Munich is named for the monks who were here before there was a city. That is not decoration. It is the first fact in the story.
Beer began here as monastery work, brewed by men who needed something to live on through the fasts. The dukes let it grow because it could be taxed. The church blessed it because it was already theirs. And at the height of it, this city held more than eighty brewing houses.
Today there are six. This tour follows the whole arc, from the earliest brewing anyone can document to the secularisation, the mergers and the failures that left those six names standing. And it corrects what needs correcting on the way. The water was never poisonous. The famous law was not written to protect your beer.
Two and a half hours through Munich, from more than eighty breweries down to six.
Before there was a city there was an order of monks, and the city took its name from them. Brewing was their work long before it was anyone's business, and the whole story runs out of that one fact.
It is named on every beer tour in this city. Almost nobody giving those tours has read it. One look at the page and the famous purity law turns out to be something else entirely.
In 1589 the ruler of Bavaria decided that buying beer from Protestant Saxony was a political problem, and built his own brewery to end it. It is still standing, and it is still full.
Monastery brewhouses were sold off, families bought them, the families merged, and the survivors became the names you will drink tonight. The end of the tour is the reason your glass says what it says.