Really Old Breweries

We took a trip to Kelheim, which is a small town in Bavaria that happens to have not one but two breweries with "the oldest" claims.  First up is the Weltenburger Klosterbrauerei.   The easiest (and to my mind most delightful) way to get there from the center of town is to take a boat trip down the Danube.

The brewery is located at a Benedictine monastery (that also has a pretty cool church) and claims to be the oldest monastery brewery in the world having been in existence since 1050.  I believe the Weihenstephan monastery not too far away may have something to say about that, though.

This is the Danube Gorge which is the narrowest and deepest part of the Bavarian Danube (which is a qualifier because the Danube is the second longest river in Europe).  It's right before the monastery.

We may have chugged our beers here a bit (their most famous, the barock dunkel, a real nice dark lager) in order to catch the boat back to go through the aforementioned gorge and get to our second brewery.

We were in a bit of a rush because we hoped to take the tour here at the Weisses Brauhaus and we wanted to make sure we had plenty of time.  It turns out that they didn't have headsets to translate the German tour into English (though the website said they did), so we decided not to take the tour figuring our time would be better spent drinking in the biergarten.  I don't think this was the wrong decision as their beer is delicious and wheat beer has always been a favorite of mine, but it's a bit of a shame, because they have a pretty interesting history.

The actual company name is G. Schneider & Sohn and you may know them as the makers of Schneider Weisse.  King Ludwig II (of Neuschwanstein fame) and the Bavarian royal family held exclusive brewing rights but sold them to Georg Schneider I because of declining popularity.  He began brewing in Munich in 1872 and is credited by some as saving wheat beer.  The brewery we visited in Kelheim is now their main brewery and has been making wheat beer since 1607 (though they bought it in 1927).  This gives them the oldest wheat beer brewery in Bavaria.  Unfortunately, the original Munich brewery was destroyed during WWII, but they still have a brauhaus of some sort at the original spot, I believe.  They are still family owned and Georg Schneider VI is running things now.

The whole street that the brewery is on smells great (like freshly baking bread).  It's a cool place and lest you think we had had our fill of beer, the next day we went to Oktoberfest, but we'll get to that.  To fulfill our glassware addiction, we bought two (one from each) which was showing restraint.

Also, because this is the internet, here's a cat we met in Kelheim.  Chrissy was particularly smitten.