Creating new urban futures for post-industrial sites presents multiple challenges to European societies. It implies assessing the existing sites – their layered meanings, uses, materialities and roles in the city – and requires us to make several choices about heritage values. This paper presents a case study of the brewery of Carlsberg in Copenhagen, and how it is transformed during urban redevelopment. The author presents the initial plan, shows how things did not go quite as imagined (when do they ever?) and illuminates a gap between the experts and new public users’ perception of the site. Acknowledging that neither heritage nor aesthetics are absolute values, the article calls for more open and adaptive ways of transforming industrial sites.