Ayinger, Munich’s Country Brewery

Ayinger is affectionately known as Munich’s “country brewery,” and it’s easy to see why. When you take the train out from Munich, the cityscape gives way to the industrial margins of the city, and then suddenly you’re on a broad green plain with gently rolling hills to the north and the snowy crenellations of the Alps to the south. A mere half an hour from the city, Aying hits the spot for slowing down to relax in the countryside with a beer or three.

The brewery rises up on the outskirts of this idyllic village where wooden chalets with an Alpine flair cluster around an onion-domed church as white as the driven snow. Aying and its brewery present a study in contrasts. You can tuck into hearty Bavarian fare like Tellerfleisch (boiled brisket with stewed vegetables and horseradish) or Käsespätzle (highly recommended!) in the rustic surroundings of the Ayinger Bräustüberl in the center of the village. But the delicious beers accompanying the traditional food come from a state-of-the-art production facility that seems light years from the carved wooden balconies and flower boxes that dot the town.

Ayinger: A Brief Glance at the Past

Owned and operated by the same family since its founding in the nineteenth century, Ayinger is a relative newcomer on the German beer scene. Ayinger may not have the same kind of storied history as other breweries in the region, but it has been around long enough to propel itself into the upper echelons of the German beer scene.

When Johann Liebhard established his brewery in 1878, he had an entirely practical reason for doing so. He had just inherited Zum Pfleger from his parents, a property complete with a forest, farm, butchery, and tavern. He was also now responsible for over a dozen farmhands and servants, each of whom had a claim on two liters of beer per day as part of their contract. Another resident of Aying had faced similar prospects five years previous and simply founded his own brewery at the nearby Sixthof estate. Johann followed suit.

By the time the brewery passed to the next generation, Johann had acquired Sixthof, which now houses the Ayinger Bräustüberl. The rustic inn that now houses the Brauereigasthof Aying was built in 1923, while Franz Inselkammer of the postwar generation expanded Ayinger’s reach in Munich by acquiring the famous Platzl folk music revue right across from the Hofbräuhaus.

A Weekend in Aying

Most beer drinkers in North America first became acquainted with the brewery through its acclaimed Celebrator Doppelbock, the beer with the plastic goat draped around the neck of its bottle. Wonderful as this beer is, there’s so much more at the source. And you don’t even have to be the most intrepid beer traveler in the world to board a train in the center of Munich, alight at Aying, and walk the few score paces to the brewery or the Bräustüberl with its beer garden.

Aying is easy to visit from Munich as a day trip, or even an early-morning excursion with a brewery tour and lunch that’ll have you back in the city by late afternoon. But there’s an even more relaxing way to enjoy Aying if you’re willing to splurge a few more euros: the Brauereigasthof Aying next to Ayinger’s former brewhouse. The Inselkammers and their ancestors focused not only on brewing top-notch beer, but on turning Aying into a leisure destination, a “complete beer experience” renowned for its gastronomy and accommodation.

Current owner Franz Inselkammer III’s great-grandparents August and Maria Zehentmair were the ones who, despite hardships in the wake of WWI and a dire economic situation marked by rampant inflation, set the Brauereigasthof Aying on its path toward becoming an elegant inn.

Brauereigasthof Aying’s location within sight of the St. Andreas parish church couldn’t be better. The rooms in front look out onto the Ayinger Bräustüberl, tempting you with the siren call of the bustling beer garden below.

The dilemma is an exquisite one: a high-end meal featuring local ingredients prepared with a cosmopolitan flair at the Restaurant August und Maria downstairs, or the bucolic Bräustüberl across the street. You could split the difference by having dinner in the more down-to-earth setting of the Bräustüberl and save the rarified environment of the Brauereigasthof’s dining room for the stellar breakfast buffet.

Dining dilemmas aside, there’s another reason why you might want to consider spending a night away from the hullabaloo of Munich: sheer relaxation. Arrive in Aying in the afternoon, work up a thirst wandering the paths in the countryside around the village, spend the early evening in the beer garden, have your meal, and then get a good night’s sleep in anticipation of your tour of the Ayinger brewery the next morning. From the Brauereigasthof Aying, it’s an amble of less than a kilometer, which beats having to scramble from Munich in the morning to make it to the brewery in time for the tour.

A Cutting-Edge Brewery for Traditional Beers

And what a tour it is, a wondrous juxtaposition between the old and the new. Built in 1999, the brewhouse was engineered with an eye toward sustainable practices that minimize the impact of brewing on the environment. Robots stack pallets of beer at the end of the bottling line. Automation controls processes that pump the beer through the miles of pipes that run between the mash tun, the decoction kettle, the brew kettle, the fermenters, and the bright tanks — all to bring you beers with names that harken back to the past, like Altbairisch Dunkel or Kirtabier, a beer brewed for the annual Kirchweih church festival.

Everywhere you look, natural light dances on the surfaces of polished stainless steel. Your tour guide will conduct you into a maze of glimmering fermenters for a glass of young and yeasty beer pulled from a gleaming Zwickelhahn, a coiled tap attached directly to the fermenter. There’s no wood here, no material hint of the deep-seated tradition that guides Ayinger’s approach to brewing. But it’s there, in the beer: the commitment to tradition represented by that malt fullness you can only get from decoction mashing. After climbing a few flights of stairs as the tour nears its beer-tasting climax, you’ll see the tops of the open fermenters, another nod to tradition. These are for Ayinger’s voluptuous wheat beers, all of which are decocted and open-fermented.

The Beers of Ayinger

Ayinger’s dozen or so beers are brewed with water from an aquifer 176 meters beneath the village that was tapped when the new brewhouse was built. The tasty water, which is also bottled and sold as mineral water, is rich in carbonates. This makes it ideal for brewing darker, maltier beers. Grain comes from farms no further than 50 kilometers away from the brewery. As Ayinger’s sixth-generation owner Franz Inselkammer Jr. notes, “We know exactly which fields grow the raw materials for our beer.” Ayinger sources its hops exclusively from the Hallertau region a short distance to the north — a spicy goodness on fullest display in Ayinger’s brightly aromatic and peppery Bairisch Pils, one of the finer Pilsners in Bavaria (Two Tankards).

Other beers on the lighter end of the spectrum include the delicious Jahrhundert Bier, an export-strength beer first brewed in 1978 to celebrate the brewery’s centenary. Slightly richer than Ayinger’s bready Lager Hell, the Jahrhundert Bier tips the balance in favour of spicy-herbal hops and smooth bitterness. But the malt’s no mere bit-player here, its layered complexity highlighting country bread, honeyed graham cracker, and blanched almonds (One Tankard).

The wheat beers at Ayinger are top shelf. Urweisse is a traditional amber Weissbier with orange zest and banana custard bolstered by toasty and sugared notes reminiscent of crème brûlée (Two Tankards). Be sure to try the Bräuweisse as well, a lemon-gold helles Weissbier that’s hard to find beyond the brewery walls. It’s similar to the Urweisse but lighter in heft, with more pronounced citrus and orange blossom notes (One Tankard). If you’re lucky enough to visit during the winter months when the Weizenbock is served on draft, you’re in for one of the best wheat beers you’ll taste. The beer is a satisfying mélange of banana custard, honey, nutmeg, vanilla, and orange goodness (Three Tankards).

On the darker end of the colour scale, Ayinger’s Alt-Bairisch Dunkel is paradigmatic. Deeply hued with a chestnut-ruby sparkle, this lightly hopped and malty quaff calls forth freshly baked pumpernickel, toast, and malted milk mingling with coffee roast notes (Three Tankards). Grab a bottle of Ayinger’s Altbairisch Dunkel Unfiltriert on your way out the door from the brewery’s gift shop for an extra special treat. And then there’s Ayinger’s Celebrator with its taut malt and notes of bitter chocolate, a Doppelbock that needs no introduction to anyone even remotely acquainted with German beer. This earthy and brooding beer may be world renowned, but Ayinger’s Winterbock is rounder and gentler on the palate, with cocoa and licorice layered over a bouquet of dried fruit featuring dates, figs, and dark cherry (Three Tankards).

Other beers to keep an eye out for include the round and yeasty unfiltered Kellerbier brewed in honour of Ayinger’s founder Johann Liebhard, and the russet Kirtabier. This is an unfiltered version of Ayinger’s delightful Oktoberfest-Märzen that turns up in North American bottle shops when summer shades into fall.

Practical information:

*Aying is about 25 kilometers southeast of Munich. To get there, take the S7 from Munich toward either Kreuzstrasse or Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn or and get out at Aying. The ride takes 35-40 minutes. From the train station, it’s a leisurely stroll of about a kilometer to the Bräustüberl and its beer garden, and less than a kilometer on foot to the brewery.

*Brewery tours in German are offered each Tuesday at 11:00 am, each Thursday at 6:00 pm, and each Saturday at 10:00 am. Private tours in English are available for €150 for groups up to 15 people, and for €10/person for groups of 16 or more. Send an email to brau.erlebnis@ayinger.de for reservations and further information.

Last Call:

*Since Ayinger’s brewhouse is fully automated, the system is closed almost one-hundred percent of the time, which mitigates against the ingress of oxygen. (Ayinger’s open-fermented Weissbiers are the exception.) As any “lodo” brewing fan knows, low levels of dissolved oxygen not only helps preserve the freshly crushed malt character of delicate beers like Pils and Helles, it also contributes to that rich country bread character that’s so hard to describe.

*If you’re the hiking type, you can do a 10-km loop through meadows and farmland from Aying to the Baroque St. Emmeram parish church in Kleinhelfendorf before sitting down for your beer in the Ayinger Bräustüberl or in its leafy precincts out front.

*For those keeping score at home, Ayinger’s brewing output was 137,500 hectoliters in 2018.

Sources

Ayinger Privatbrauerei, “Geschichte.”

Ayinger Privatbrauerei, “Umwelterklärung 2019.”

Brewery tours: 28 May 2016; 9 January 2020 (private tour, Herr Bischoff).

Iris Hilberth, “Vom Haustrunk zur Marke für Kenner,” Mir san Bier: Braukunst und Biergärten in und um München (Munich: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2013).

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