Since there’s nothing Bavarians love more than eating in the open air, we’ve got your Brotzeit picnic baskets covered – from sausage and radish salads to brawn. So it’s off to the beer garden, where a fresh Bavarian beer awaits!
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Such was the pious and strictly followed rule. So it’s no wonder then that the art of beer brewing in the early Middle Ages was particularly cultivated at the Bavarian monasteries, where praying and working (Latin: orare and laborare), as well as the fasting times in between, were often exceptionally hard. The monks therefore applied their Christian diligence and zeal to refining their fasting beverages. The strongly brewed beer they produced was in fact greatly beneficial, and nourished the impoverished friars enough for them to continue working and praying. It also unquestionably brightened their mood. Each of the brothers would ultimately receive five helpings (or measures) a day. And the quantity which later became the Mass (meaning measure) was the equivalent of one to two litres of the delicious brew. So the Bavarians’ ongoing love of beer today clearly has spiritual origins, and can be seen as having a Bavarian Catholic heritage.
Bavaria’s brewing culture was officially born in 1040, when the city of Freising granted the Benedictine abbey brewery in Weihenstephan the right to brew and serve alcoholic beverages. In Munich, too, it was mainly the monasteries which brewed beer professionally some one hundred years after the city’s founding in 1158. The monks’ beer gained a prominent reputation, for nowhere else was beer produced with such fervour.
To ensure others could also profit from the amber-nectar business, Duke Stephen II established the “brewing constitution” in 1372, and from then on, anyone could purchase “the right to brew” for a fee. But, as one might imagine, this did not always benefit the beer quality; all kinds of preservatives were often added to the brew, making it not only taste terrible, but also at times causing strange psychedelic or other side effects not felt from the monks’ clea
