Beer and stage and lots of stories

Created: 05/21/2022, 15:02

By: Andrea Graepel

A postcard view from 1898. © Verein Heimatgeschichte Inning

To this day, the 40 meter high chimney of the brewery in Stegen is visible from afar into the sky.

An industrial monument that was meanwhile left to decay.

Built in 1892 by Ottmar Schreyegg, the walls have belonged to Paul Schneider since 1993.

The brewery has 130 years of eventful history.

Stegen

– There was a lot of turbulence around the defining building with its special industrial charm.

Paul Schneider muses that this was put in a benevolent way.

Anyone who knows the argumentative lawyer knows what he means.

On March 2, 1993, he bought the dilapidated, partially burned down walls of the Stegen brewery and rebuilt them.

"So many people walked past me in this house," he says, laughing.

Only one friend from the early days remained: the actor Michl Thorbecke.

"He lived with me in the ruins at the time." It was uninhabited for more than 20 years.

As late as 1952, the Stegen brewery was one of the seven most important commercial establishments in Inning, according to research by the Inning local history association.

No investments have been made since the late 1960s.

The last brew was brewed in 1972, two years later the brewery and malthouse were completely deregistered.

The history of the original three breweries in Inning seemed to have come to an end with the closure of Stegen.

The wheat beer brewery in Bachern and the Inninger brewery next to the "Gasthof zur Post" had already closed before the Second World War.

The building in Stegen hit the headlines when the Starnberg district administrator at the time, Rudolf Widmann, wanted to have a hotel complex with 200 beds built in its place.

Only after loud protests and court proceedings was the plan dropped in 1985 – for economic reasons, among other things.

Such thoughts are and were alien to Paul Schneider.

The brewery was the tenth renovation project of this magnitude that the lawyer took on.

When nobody was interested in the old walls anymore, he said he offered the Steinle family who owned them in Stegen two million marks.

Two weeks later they were sitting at the notary.

Schneider still says today: “Money has no erotic attraction for me.

I want to keep the soul of the building.” You'd think he's succeeded.

In any case, he is satisfied with the mixture of culture, gastronomy and trade.

That was how he had always imagined it.

With Daniel Betz' Groundlift-Studio as a partner, he even plans to add a stage, he says.

The application has already been made.

Beer has also been brewed again since 2011.

He just signed a new master brewer on Friday.

The first master brewer 130 years ago was Ottmar Schreyegg.

He had married into Stegen after he had to leave the count's brewery in Seefeld in disgrace because of adulterated beer.

In Stegen he brewed his own beer.

First in the inn of the same name, which still exists today.

Then he built his own brewery on the Stegen hill in 1892.

The Old Stegen Brewery is 130 years old.

© Andrea Jaksch

Stegen beer was very quickly in demand among summer visitors from Munich and Augsburg.

Schreyegg not only knew how to advertise his business and cleverly market his beer.

He was also one of the five main shareholders of the Ammerseeschifffahrt joint-stock company, which was newly founded in 1878.

After the Pansch scandal, the Schreyegg name only hit the headlines negatively again - and that in a dramatic way when Ottmar Schreyegg (probably the son) crossed the frozen Ammersee to Schondorf on a sled with his buddies in 1922.

Schreyegg drove back alone, his friends had advised him against it.

With good reason, it turned out, as the sled collapsed.

Schreyegg drowned.

Paul Schneider also wants to keep stories like these alive.

For the 125th anniversary, he himself published a book with stories from earlier and more recent times.

He seems almost surprised himself when he says of himself that he has found the way to harmony after all the turbulence of the past almost 30 years.

Schneider is now 75 years old and may have found a certain mildness with age.

Incidentally, his well-formulated biting comments can still be read in the Hauspostille, which appears four times a year.

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He probably won't be able to resist such bitingness in the next issue either, after it became known what is planned on the Stegen hill - nine luxury properties at a price of 3.9 to eight million euros.

"Thomas Gottschalk had offered me the property for 2.3 million euros," says Schneider, annoyed that he hadn't struck at the time.

“Now they are destroying the Stegen hill.

I would have left it that way, that's my motto in life.

Today I would be willing to pay a much larger amount to get what is.

That would have been the round-off I always had in mind.”