Bayreuth's longest bar features exposed CEMEX concrete

The Gebrüder Maisel Brewery in Germany has opened a restaurant with an innovative concept and design. A high-performance, specialty CEMEX concrete played a central role in the bar design for the restaurant "Liebesbier," which means "Love Beer" in German.

In the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth, Germany, the new Liebesbier Restaurant is a treat for visitors to the historic Gebrüder Maisel Brewery. With its brewing workshop, open bakery and in-house distillery, Liebesbier gives guests the opportunity to enjoy a variety of 115 beers. Beers flow from 21 taps along a bar that stretches 25 meters – the longest in the city – and the unique base of the bar consists of exposed concrete supplied by CEMEX.

"To achieve best exposed concrete results in the reproduction of the formwork texture, and to meet the requirements of our customer, we developed a recipe variant of an easily compactable CEMEX Concrete", explains Karsten Schubert, CEMEX Senior Manager of Product Technology, Ready Mix & Pumping in Germany.

This particular concrete is part of a family of easy-compacting concretes that CEMEX offers in Germany. It has a high resistance to water penetration and is thus ideal for construction projects that require water-proof components. There are also additional benefits that made it an excellent choice for Liebesbier: it’s distinguished by its high fine particle content and good flow properties.

With 21 beer taps along 25 meters of countertop, this bar is at the heart of the Liebesbier restaurant. Its base consists of exposed concrete surfaces with built-in ornaments and lettering. A high-performance specialty CEMEX concrete was used to achieve the texture and finish. (Photo: CEMEX Deutschland AG / Studio Thomas Köhler)

These properties were important to satisfy the client’s design requirements. The aim was to achieve a cavity-free concrete surface with a rough, wooden board texture that was created with formwork. Lettering and symbols would be depressed into the surface as negative spaces by inserting matrices into the formwork. The chosen concrete had to be resistant enough to avoid fractures at the edges when the inserted matrices were removed.

Schubert adds that, "This result could only be achieved with a flowing high-performance concrete adjusted for this special application. The close coordination with the formwork builders and processors prior to concreting brought the desired outcome, which was as the client had requested: The project manager of the construction project, Peter Glenk from Arthur Ingenieure GmbH, was impressed by our product, the design possibilities it offers, the delivery, and the product advice."

In addition to the specialty concrete, CEMEX also delivered around 1,500 cubic meters of various construction concretes for the Liebesbier project. The brewery's in-house construction department used these concretes to visibly reinforce and upgrade the historic brewery building in many places for its guests.

CEMEX is a global building materials company that provides high quality products and reliable service to customers and communities in more than 50 countries. Celebrating its 110th anniversary, CEMEX has a rich history of improving the well-being of those it serves through innovative building solutions, efficiency advancements, and efforts to promote a sustainable future.