OnTap Magazine

22 | Winter 2025 | ontapmag.co.za THIS IS SPATEN FEATURE JONNY GARRETT EXCERPT FROM THE MEANING OF BEER Jonny Garrett , cofounder of the Craft Beer Channel and two-time winner of the “Beer Writer of the Year” award, recently published his fourth book: The Meaning of Beer. In this book, Garrett travels the globe in search of the deeper cultural impact of brewing — how it has become one of the world’s most important inventions and shaped our lives for millennia. Garrett attended and spoke at this year’s BeerEx Africa conference hosted in Cape Town in late May, and luckily for us, agreed to share an excerpt from The Meaning of Beer with On Tap readers. This particular story details how the first fridge was actually created for beer (and not food!). Copies of the book were made available at BeerEx, but if you didn’t grab one then, you can order it online. Enjoy! M unich is beer town, almost literally. Its history is rooted in monasticism, and as we’ve learned, where there are monks, there is usually beer. Their influence has made Munich one of the best cities in the world to go drinking: there’s even a brewery in the airport for god’s sake. On a bleak January night in 2023 I didn’t have time for a cheeky security-side pint, though. I’d ambitiously booked a tour of Spaten Brewing just a few hours after land- ing, and was hoping the fact that there was no on-site taproom didn’t mean I’d wait hours for my first beer. Things didn’t look good on my arrival at the very industrial looking entrance gate, around the back from Munich’s main train station. Spaten is, tragically, something of a mothball brand. It doesn’t have its own brewery, instead sharing it with another his- toric Munich brand, Löwenbräu, and wheat beer powerhouse Franziskaner. All three are owned by the world’s biggest brewing com- pany, AB InBev, and aren’t really seen in the wild in Munich. In fact, outside of Oktober- fest you’ll struggle to find Spaten anywhere, which is an incredible shame because the beer’s still pretty good and Spaten is argu- ably the most important brewery to have ever existed. The front gate, however, is a little under- stated – in fact it’s just a goods entrance. Unsurprisingly the security guard didn’t of- fer me a beer, but I had a feeling my guide Martin Wittal was going to. He had that twinkle in his eye; the look of a man who knows a cold lager isn’t far away. We shook hands, and he beckoned me into a tiny wooden panelled lift. It took a few floors for me to realise that we were climbing the main tower, a former grain silo that looms over this part of central Munich. The rickety lift shook to a halt and opened on a board- room with glass windows on three walls. We were at the top, looking out across the city… and there was a bar in the corner. Martin poured me a crisp, pale beer with a healthy two-inch head, and we sat down. ‘I’ve brought the book,’ he says, pointing to a biblical tomb called Die Spaten Brau- erei that I’d skimmed numerous times, but struggled with due to the fact that it’s in German. ‘I don’t know how much you al- ready know.’ I’d translated enough by begging friends, rinsing Google translate and scratching to- gether my A-level German to learn quite a lot about Spaten – but what I knew wasn’t the issue, it was what I believed. The stories and the importance attached to them are so mind bending that the fact it isn’t the stuff of tired pub quizzes everywhere makes