Alpine Village home to Old World brews in Torrance
Silvia Bennett, who manages the Alpine Village Market in Torrance. Photo “For many years,” says Otto Radtke, the general manager at Alpine Village, “we were one of the only places in Southern California to buy some of the best old world beers available.” It may also be the only place in Southern California where Oktober Fest, which continues through October 27, is celebrated to the beat of oompah bands imported from Munich. The breweries he’s referring to include Weihenstephaner, the oldest existing brewery in the world (1040 A.D., Weltenberg, Germany) and Weltenberger, which is the oldest existing monastery brewery in the world (1050 A.D., Weltenberg, Germany). Alpine Village has been around since 1958, and had, onsite, one of the first breweries in this part of the state. The Alpine Village Market was built later, in the mid-1970s, and there were no Coors or Budweiser cartoons in sight during a recent visit. Manager Silvia Bennett, who hails from Augsburg, near Munich, despite the non-German last name, points out that the beers I’ve been looking over with lust in my eyes also come from Poland, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Holland, and Austria – there’s a keg of Austrian Zipfer…
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