And the customer collected a few francs of satisfaction for every day lost.
How high would that sum have to be if an entire keg of beer arrives 48 years late? It was delivered in October 2026. But the brewery sent the keg on its journey back in the year of the beer 1978. The recipient back then was the Schwarzensteinhütte, at around 3000 m in the Zillertal Alps, on the South Tyrolean side. A helicopter had the keg on a cable, meant to supply thirsty mountain hikers at the Schwarzensteinhütte with well-earned beer. But as chance sometimes has it, there was a crevasse in the way, somewhere along that long path through the alpine air. As the helicopter crossed the crevasse, the keg came loose from the cable and vanished into the ice. The crevasse must have closed up again afterward, it seems, because nobody could ever find the then-young keg.
The keg resurfaced after forty-eight years of its odyssey, in October 2026, below the Schwarzensteinhütte. It looks dented, but is intact, and bears the engraving “1978” — the year it was filled.
The beer supplier back then was the South Tyrolean beverage dealer Harpf, from Bruneck. The company Harpf wasn’t about to pass up the chance to announce this find on Instagram. The dealer suspects, “with high probability,” that the keg came from its own warehouse. Why the guesswork here? Even after almost fifty years, there’s surely a delivery slip or an invoice that sent the keg on its way.
And who found the keg? Daniel and Michael, two men fond of climbing mountains, are said to have stumbled across it. And there, the word serendipity gets its well-deserved moment of relevance. The two men were after all out for a high-altitude adventure — but certainly not hunting for an ancient keg of beer. The finders carried it back down into the valley, and it was tapped in the circle around the beverage dealer Harpf. “O’zapft is.”
The beer, it’s said, was still drinkable. A glacier likes to give a little something back now and then, over the millennia — tools, bodies, and apparently, beer too.
“Isn’t that right, Ötzi?”
One of the many legends about beer is the claim that there’s no beer in Hawaii. Well, that may be so. Or it may not. But when a glacier, perfectly cool about it, releases its beer reserves after all that time, that’s alpine generosity, lived out in full.
And not a bad-beer idea at all.
