Obama’s G7 Summit Sipper Inspires German Brewery to Rename Beer

Since Sunday morning’s controversial fruhschoppen moment, when President Obama drank half-liter wheat beers with Angela Merkel before the G7 Summit (and before noon), the drink’s alcohol content has been twice confirmed by both the local Karg Brewery and White House press secretary Josh Earnest.

Per NYT:

“I’m not aware of what kind of beer the president was served, but I’m confident that he did not order a nonalcoholic beer,” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, told reporters. “I don’t know what he was eventually served, but I would be very, very surprised if he ordered a nonalcoholic beer, even after an overnight flight on a Sunday morning.”

Meanwhile, the local brewer, Victoria Schubert says her brewery doesn’t even make a non-alcoholic beer, and she tells the Guardian the potent beer is being renamed in honor of the moment:

“They were certainly not drinking alcohol-free beer,” she said. “It was 5% proof, with an original gravity of 11%, and like all German beer it was brewed according to the 500-year-old purity laws.”

She said it came from a family recipe that was more than 100 years old and which “has only been tweaked a bit here and there over the years”.

To celebrate the occasion, six liters of the rechristened Summit Weissbier was sent to the Schloss Elmau resort hosting the summit. So if it really is non-alcoholic, as the local mayor, Thomas Schwarzenberger, still argues, the world leaders can drink it without judgment.

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