It is a grim letter that August Maerz addressed to the comrades of the Reutberg brewery in December. In 2019, the monastery brewery would still have supplied its barrels to maypole vigils and solstice celebrations, beer tents and garden parties. In 2020 everything fell away overnight, writes the chairman. And yet the company is in the black. It is not the first time that the small traditional brewery has survived a crisis.
August Maerz is a massive man with Bavarian costume and Bavarian pronunciation. He was born in Lenggries under a brewery and still lives there today, only the brewery no longer exists – the Reutberger beer cooperative, of which he is now chairman, is one of the last existing traditional breweries among the many that once existed in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district. “One of the smallest and most insignificant survived,” says the 61-year-old.
The qualified carpenter expertly guides you through the brewery cellar on the Reutberg and cracks his jokes with such a serious expression that you sometimes almost ignore them. “Unlike officials, wood always works,” he jokes in the room with the wooden barrels. Beer in a wooden barrel goes bad quickly. “Then it no longer looks like beer, but like a urological problem.” But the problem this year is not how long the beer can be kept in wooden barrels, but whether they are filled at all.
August Maerz, CEO of the Reutberg cooperative brewery, takes a look inside the brewing kettle. With the lockdown in November 2020, he had to watch as beer worth 40,000 euros was dumped.
(Photo: Manfred Neubauer/SZ)
He is “terribly annoyed” about the Corona regulations of the past two years, about the back and forth, the short-term announcements and even more short-term withdrawals from the government, says Maerz. A company like his has to plan for the long term. When the lockdown came in November 2020, the Reutberg brewers gradually had to throw away beer worth a total of 40,000 euros. It was unclear whether it would still be possible until the restaurants were allowed to open again. And the brewery lives primarily from the restaurants that serve their beer, from village festivals, weddings and garden parties that request their kegs. Six restaurants that sold Reutberger beer are in the process of being closed due to the pandemic. Successors are not in sight. In 2018, before Corona, the Reutberger brewery recorded an annual surplus of around 195,000 euros, but in 2020 it was only around 60,000 euros. But still: The brewery made a profit, also last year.
The 18 employees of the small company applied for short-time work and began to save wherever they could. They worked in shifts and the co-op chairmen worked a lot of overtime. But not only that: The Reutberger Klosterbrauerei also received a lot of support from the population. This has happened several times in history.
In 1987 the Reutberger brewery was supposed to merge with another one. That was stopped at the last moment.
(Photo: Manfred Neubauer/SZ)
“Beer has been brewed on the Reutberg since 1677,” Maerz explains. “It went down a lot and sometimes even up.” At the beginning of the 20th century, the Franciscan nuns considered closing their monastery brewery. But there was so much resistance from the surrounding villages – the population threatened to burn down the monastery – that the nuns rejected their plan. In 1987, when the monastery brewery had already been in the hands of the cooperative for 63 years, it experienced what was probably its greatest crisis to date. The demand for the beer had increased so much that the brewery bought and mixed beer from other sources. The quality went down. In 1987 the Reutberger brewery was supposed to merge with that in Holzkirchen. That’s when the farmer Hans Kappelsberger spoke up: “If two sick people get married, nobody is healthy by a long shot,” he is still quoted as saying today. He became the new director and led the brewery out of mismanagement.
Today, the Sachsenkam brewery produces three times the amount of beer it used to produce – namely 22,000 hectoliters per year. In 14 different varieties. “We have everything except light and alcohol-free,” says Maerz and grins. “Nothing the board doesn’t like.” His brewery delivers barrels from Franconia to Tyrol, from Chiemgau to Allgäu. Even in Berlin, before Corona, there was a regulars’ table that was supplied with Reutberger draft beer, and sometimes the beer also flew to the USA. But “we sell most of it around the church tower,” says Maerz. And it was from there that his brewery received support during the crisis: Because people couldn’t go to the beer garden, they bought their Reutberger beer out of the bottle in the supermarket.
Sales of bottled beers increased by around ten percent during the corona pandemic: in 2021, the Reutberger brewery sold 18,000 hectoliters of beer from the bottle. “We didn’t even dream of that,” says CEO August Maerz.
(Photo: Manfred Neubauer/SZ)
Maerz says sales of bottled beers increased by around ten percent during the corona pandemic. In 2021, the Reutberger brewery sold 18,000 hectoliters of bottled beer. “You couldn’t even dream of that,” says Maerz. While that didn’t make up for draft beer sales, it helped the brewery not slide into the red. The fact that beer enjoys such great support among the population is probably not only due to the fact that Reutberg represents the last traditional brewery in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district. But also because the Reutbergers actually still brew their beer by hand.
A thick layer of foam floats on nine basins full of fermenting beer. Maerz led through rooms with copper kettles and tanks, he came to a halt in the fermenting cellar. A man in the blue anton dips a shovel into the foam. The scene looks like something out of a zoo aquarium. But master brewer Florian Auerbach doesn’t feed the fish, he filters out clumps of hops. “That’s artisanal beer care,” says Maerz, not without pride. “It’s a daily ritual.”
Unlike large industrial breweries, the brewmasters at the Reutberger brewery manually filter the so-called cooling trub, small hop crumbs, from the fermenting beer. In large breweries, on the other hand, this step is often left out, says Maerz. There the beer would be filtered at the end. But Maerz and his master brewers are convinced that indigestible bitter substances are released with the chilled lees. That’s why they don’t skip this and other traditional work steps. However, the Reutberger Genossenschaft created another tradition itself: the festival week around the Josefibock.
Master brewer Florian Auerbach filters pieces of hops out of the fermenting beer. A manual step that many large industrial breweries skip, says CEO August Maerz. This makes the beer more bitter and less digestible.
(Photo: Manfred Neubauer/SZ)
March 19 was once a Bavarian holiday commemorating Saint Joseph, and a popular day out for carpenters. “A whole week of festivals developed from this holiday on the Reutberg,” says Maerz. The Reutberger brewery brews its own strong beer, the Josefibock. The 5,300 comrades gather for this occasion every year in the beer tent and traditionally elect two of the six chairmen of the supervisory board and one of the three board members. In the past two years, the meeting has been canceled due to corona. “If we can’t vote this year, then the elections have been postponed by a whole period,” says Maerz. It’s already too late to organize the festival until March. One thinks about alternatives, writes Maerz in his letter to the members. “These range from a meeting in the form of drive-in cinemas to a general assembly by letter.” However, he doesn’t sound convinced.