Augustiner’s chief dies in avalanche
The co-owner and Managing Director of Munich’s Augustiner Brewery is dead. Dr Jannik Inselkammer, 45, was buried by an avalanche in Canada on 24 March 2014. He was waiting for his helicopter to fly him out after a heli-ski expedition to the Selkirk mountain range in British Columbia.
The Augustiner Brewery praised Mr Inselkammer in an announcement on its website. "His sudden death touches us deeply and we bow our heads in an eternal bond." Who will succeed Mr Inselkammer is not clear at the moment.
A commemorative service for Mr Inselkammer was held in the Jesuit church of St Michael in central Munich, just across the street from the Augustiner beer hall on 29 March 2014. More than 1500 people attended, while one of Augustiner’s beer drays, pulled by four black cart horses, stood outside.
Mr Inselkammer was born into Bavarian brewing dynasty. His father is the Munich brewing entrepreneur Hans Inselkammer, himself a cousin of Franz Inselkammer, the owner of the Aying brewery. From 1997 until 2003 Mr Inselkammer was Managing Director of the Tucher Brewery in Fürth and Nuremberg, which his family owned until it was sold to Germany’s Radeberger brewing group. His family also owns a 35 percent stake in Munich’s Augustiner Brewery, allegedly the oldest in Munich, founded in 1328.
The majority shareholder of Augustiner is the Edith Haberland-Wagner foundation, set up by Edith Haberland-Wagner, who left her shares in the brewery to the foundation upon her death in 1996. The foundation uses its profits from the Augustiner Brewery to fund cultural and social projects in Munich. Already in November last year Augustiner Brewery had to come to terms with the passing away of Ferdinand Schmid, 88, Augustiner’s eminence grise, who ran the brewery from 1970 to 1991 and until his death headed the foundation.
The eminently tight-lipped Augustiner Brewery is the last Munich brewery that is still entirely privately owned. Its secretive ways are well-known. When the beer writer Michael Jackson wanted to include it in his Beer Guide, he was told they had rather not have him say anything about them as they would not know how to handle extra demand by distributors and importers. However, although Augustiner Brewery eschews advertising and sells most of its beer in the old-fashioned euro bottles, it has a cult following in Munich and elsewhere in Germany with beer output continuously increasing to over 1.4 million hl in 2013.
