The question, of course, is whether beer stocks in public administrations can be reconciled with official sobriety. In the Miesbach district office, for example, the public prosecutor’s office investigated a year ago because 150 liters of draft beer were kept ready next to the disaster situation center. There, however, the keg slowly became empty while the beer in the town hall of Neumarkt-St. Veit in the district of Mühldorf has survived a full four decades. It even moved once, with the entire city administration in 2001. The two bottles of Klosterbräu were only discovered behind that vertical shelf in front of the back wall of an office cupboard. The current mayor Erwin Baumgartner took the bottles back then. He probably lost one at an exhibition, which is why the other became all the more important as a contemporary witness. After all, the Klosterbräu St. Veit hasn’t existed since 1984. But maybe again soon, for which Baumgartner sacrificed half of the last bottle.
Bernhard Altmann, the great-grandson of the last St. Veiter Klosterbräu, has been trying for years to persuade the archbishop’s ordinariate in Munich to reopen the Klosterbräustüberl as a brewery in exchange for his property. He was also with the mayor, and that’s when the conversation turned to what was possibly the very last bottle of Klosterbräu-Export, which probably came from the brewery’s then-customary Christmas carrier for the city administration. After all, the mayor was convinced of Altmann’s plans and made half of his historic pints available to him to have them analyzed in a laboratory for ingredients and recipe. According to the beer sommelier Altmann, the sample brew prepared after that has a fine, slightly reduced hop bitterness compared to the taste of the time, with nuances of citrus fruits and grassy notes. Baumgartner says he liked it too. He can’t remember the taste of the original, and neither he nor Altmann tried the old bottle. Half of it went to the laboratory and the other half is back in Baumgartner’s office, freshly corked, as per the contract.