The Elephant Gate
Four stone elephants of 1901 carrying a tower over the road.
discosour from New York, NY — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Troels Dejgaard Hansen from Copenhagen, Denmark — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Thue C. Leibrandt — CC BY-SA 3.0
The old brewery in the Valby district, reopened as a museum in 2022 after a long closure. What makes it worth a visit is not the beer but **what the money it made was used for**. **J. C. Jacobsen** founded the brewery in 1847 and named it after his son Carl. He then did something unusual: he willed the entire ownership of the company to the **Carlsberg Foundation**, a scientific body. As a result, beer profits have funded scientific research from 1876 to the present day. Things that genuinely changed science came out of the brewery's laboratory. Here **Emil Christian Hansen** isolated the first pure yeast strain in 1883 — the basis of the entire modern brewing industry, and deliberately published **without a patent**. Here too **Søren Sørensen** developed the **pH scale** in 1909, now used in every laboratory and school on Earth. The displays include the **world's largest collection of unopened beer bottles** — over 22,000 of them — along with the famous Elephant Gate and the dray-horse stables. Note: the ticket normally includes a drink at the end; **a non-alcoholic alternative can be requested**.
Four stone elephants of 1901 carrying a tower over the road.
Over 22,000 unopened bottles, the largest in the world.
The horses that pulled the delivery carts, still in place.
Gamle Carlsberg Vej 11, Copenhagen
Yes, if what interests you is the history, the science and the architecture — which are genuinely the strongest parts: the story of the **Carlsberg Foundation** funding science from beer profits, the discovery of the **pH scale** here, and the nineteenth-century industrial buildings and Elephant Gate. **The drink included in the ticket can be swapped for a non-alcoholic one** — ask when buying. But if being in a setting where alcohol is served is itself unwelcome, this is a brewery throughout, and the city has better-suited alternatives.
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