The brewery in Velká Bíteš opened in 1687 and was torn down entirely in the 1950s, leaving only the vaulted cellars. An ordinary apartment building went up on the old foundations. The last tenants moved out in 2018, and the building has now been given over to a town cultural centre with a library, a hall and workshops.
The surviving cellars now hold an exhibition about the "witch" trials. They took place in Velká Bíteš and the surrounding area roughly a hundred years before the famous trials in Velké Losiny, and the exhibition is put together from the surviving interrogation records.
Three houses originally stood on the site. Valentin Augustin Schönbach rebuilt them into one, then the town bought the building and set up a brewery in it. It burned down in 1776 and took several years to rebuild. It never grew large: in 1935 it brewed just 241 hectolitres, the least of Moravia's 67 breweries. In 1942 the owner had to close it, and after that it was a warehouse of the Starobrno brewery.
The cellar was kept at the insistence of the heritage protection authority. Mayor Markéta Lavická says it is the only historic part of the building, and even the former ice house survived in it. By the end, the apartment block above was of no use to anyone: they tried renting the four flats to seasonal workers, but heating cost so much that nobody wanted them in winter.
Acronym Collective Studio moved the main entrance to the rounded corner facing the square, and in the hall on the top floor they removed the ceiling and opened the space up to the roof. When construction started it was estimated at 48.8 million crowns; in the end it cost 99 million. The centre opened on 31 May 2026.
