Bryggeriet Flakhaven
The Flakhaven Brewery is situated in the City Hall Building in Odense. The rooms used to house a police station with dungeons and have now been rebuilt to house 13 large 9,000-litre tuns. In one of the cells, H. C. Andersen’s grandmother was held prisoner because she had comitted the sin of having a baby out of wedlock. Having an illegitimate child was a punishable offence at that time. But it is in H. C. Andersen’s home town and, during the bicentenary of his birth, that the Flakhaven Brewery starts serving home brewed beer, thanks to, among others, two Hungarian refugees. The former dungeons have been transformed into a brewery by Lewis Harsanyi and his wife Andrea. In 1977, they managed to flee from Hungary into Austria where they were placed in a refugee camp for three months before they were granted entry permits into the USA. They settled down in Los Angeles where they established a number of restaurants and a small brewery which produced good home-made beer for their restaurants.
During this time, Lewis Harsanyi became so knowledgeable about breweries that he sold the restaurants. Now he solely works on building breweries. The Harsanyi’s still live in Los Angeles but at the same time they also operate in Hungary. Their company ”Bavarian Brewery Technologies” works with brewery instillations in the USA, Canada, England, Korea, Australia, and now also in Odense. The owners of A Hereford Beefstouw in Odense, Kirsten Redder and Jørgen Petersen, are also behind the Flakhaven Brewery.
The architecht Søren Damgaard and the artist Peter Stuhr have designed and decorated the rooms.
Mik Schack
