Updated at 9 a.m. with comments from brewery’s co-founder. 

Urban Chestnut Brewing Co., one of St. Louis’ largest and fastest growing craft brewers, is expanding internationally by opening a brewery in Germany.

Urban Chestnut said Friday that it has acquired the Bürgerbräu Wolnzach brewery in Wolnzach, Hallertau, and plans to brew small batches of beer at the Bavarian facility in the second quarter of 2015. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. 

Bavaria is the homeland of Urban Chestnut’s co-founder and brewmaster Florian Kuplent, a former Anheuser-Busch brewmaster who started Urban Chestnut with David Wolfe in 2011. Wolnzach is the world’s largest hops producing region and home of the the German Hops Museum.

The Bürgerbräu Wolnzach brewery stopped production about six months ago, and Urban Chestnut seized the opportunity to acquire it, Kuplent said in a phone interview from Germany. Urban Chestnut began expanding sales to Germany in 2013 and has been looking for a brewery there. 

“We buy a lot of ingredients from Germany and I go there often to visit my family,” Kuplent said, adding that the timing of the acquisition wasn’t planned. “It happened more quickly than we thought,” he said. 

Urban Chestnut has two breweries in St. Louis where it makes Zwickel, Winged Nut, Schnickelfritz and other beers at its original location in midtown and its new biergarten and brewery in the Grove business district that opened in early 2014, which expanded its brewing capacity to 20,000 barrels annually. Urban Chestnut expanded distribution last year to Columbia, Jefferson City and Kansas City.

With the added distribution and new brewery in the Grove, Urban Chestnut increased its beer production from 6,500 barrels in 2013 to 11,000 barrels last year.

The growth primarily came from sales in the St. Louis region, Kuplent said. Urban Chestnut is looking at other areas to grow geographically in the U.S. “We’re looking at a few other markets, but it’s still in the early stages,” he said.  

Urban Chestnut’s founders see the new facility as a way to broaden its customer base far beyond its St. Louis roots. 

“In considering different ways to grow Urban Chestnut in Germany and in Europe as a whole, we believe the U.S. craft beer model of ‘local’ is a more than viable strategy,” Wolfe said in a statement. “Actually owning and operating a brewery in Bavaria will provide us with a solid platform for growth via direct interaction with local beer drinkers and with beer drinkers visiting the Hallertau region during their beer pilgrimages.”