The monastery of Weltenburg, founded at the beginning of the 7th century by the abbot Eustasius, was turned into a Benedictine monastery by Saint Boniface, and raised to an abbey by Duke Tassilo. Weltenburg, Bavaria’s oldest monastery, became a mission centre for this region. The first references to a brewery in the Weltenburg monastery are to be found in the Weltenburg Nekrologium, in which it states the brewer died. Another scientifically recognized source is a recorded entry in the “Libellus Traditionum” which is over 900 years old, and which dates from shortly before or after 1050.
In the thousand years which have almost passed between then and the present day, the monasterial beer production in Weltenburg was only interrupted by the secularisation from 1803 to 1846. In 1846 the brewery was returned to monasterial ownership, and has remained so up to the present day. The Weltenburg Brewery can justifiably claim to be the oldest monastery brewery in the world.
Seven beers are produced in Weltenburg in accordance with the traditional art of brewing by an experienced master brewer who keeps most strictly to the Bavarian purity laws of 1516.
The special flavours of the Weltenburg Monastery beer is guaranteed by the low content of nitrates in the brewery water and the regular— up to three months long— storage in stone cellars forty meters below the ground.
Click on any of the above images to view the wonderful beers of Weltenburger Klosterbrauerei
