I'm almost done putting together a blog about my weekend in Salzburg, Austria, but before I put that up, I have to say a few words and share a few pictures from a day trip I took a week later to an out-of-the way spot in the northwestern tip of Bavaria. This place is called Kloster Kreuzberg and is in the Rhön mountains. It's not only a monastery (Kloster) but also has a big restaurant, some quaint-looking inns, hiking trails, and a brewery. Apparently the beer made in this brewery got some recognition from a 1987 Playboy article naming it the best beer in the world. So someone was reading the articles after all! Now, up to this point, I'd only ever heard the epithet "best beer in the world" applied to the Belgian Trappist ale Westvleteren 12, so if there was a rival claimant to this title, I had to taste it for myself.

It took a three-hour tour bus ride to get from Stuttgart to the monastery. After we got there, most everyone else lined up to get in the restaurant/Biergarten which was just about to open for the day. I hate standing in long lines so I just went ahead and hit the trails.

It had just stopped raining, which made this stairway look just perfect, all shrouded in mist. At the top of it were three crucifixes and twelve shrines, one for each Station of the Cross. I walked through all that on gravel trails and soon found myself on the top of a different kind of hill...


Look at that, deactivated chairlifts. Have I wandered into a closed-for-the-season ski resort?


With a few inches of snow I could ride my snowboard down this, and then get lunch and a beer at that restaurant off to the left.


In front of the aforementioned restaurant, which was naturally closed. It's called Gemündener Hutte.

After this, I probably spent the next two hours hiking back in the general direction of the restaurant in the most roundabout way I could, and ended up getting slightly lost. I had taken a picture of the map of the trails, but I had a hard time following some of the signs because they didn't always point in the exact directions of the trails at some intersections. I had intended this first hike to be a short warm-up, have lunch and a beer afterward, then go for a really big hike. This first hike wound up being the really big one with the after lunch hike being a short cool-down.

And so, finally, the much-hyped beer. They had three different types of beer available, Dunkel, Pils, and Hefeweizen. At least, that's what the website says. On their posted menu there was simply "Klosterbier" at a price of 3€ for a half-liter, and then Pils and Hefeweizen were each 3.50€ for a half-liter. The first beer I ordered was "Klosterbier," which I'm assuming was the Dunkel. Other people on the tour said it was a Pils because they seemed to think Pils and Hefe were the only beers they had. But it couldn't have been, because I only paid 3€ for it and not 3.50€...anyway! I'm going to assume that my first beer was the Dunkel. After my second, shorter hike, I came back and had a half-liter of Hefeweizen, which was really refreshing after all that forest hiking.

So was it the best beer in the world? It was delicious, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best in the world. Honestly I wouldn't rate it much better or worse than most other beers brewed in southern Germany or Austria, but that's still praise considering those are all great beers.

If you get the chance to visit this place, you should at least have a mug of the beer here. And if you want to take any home, you can buy a growler that they'll fill for you. You can't bring a growler of your own, like I did; thanks to coronavirus concerns they'll only fill one that you buy new right then. I decided not to do this since I didn't want another big piece of glass that I didn't know if I'd use again in the near future. The growlers come in three different sizes, one-, two-, and five-liter.

So that was the end of my trip; after I finished that glass of Hefeweizen it was time for the bus to head back. There may not have been much to write about but it was worth it.