One hotel, four directions
The plan was to prove that beer travel does not need a car. Munich's S-Bahn network runs to the airport, to the lakes and, with a change, to the monastery at Andechs; the ICE reaches Bamberg in three hours twenty. Everything else was walking.
The hotel sat on Schillerstraße, two streets from the Hauptbahnhof, which turned out to matter more than any brewery on the list. Every day started and ended at the same door, and the suitcase never moved.
Airbräu at the airport was the first and last stop, which is a better idea than it sounds: a copper brewhouse inside the terminal, a beer garden under the roof, and a beer before the flight home that tastes like the trip is still going.
What the rail version costs you
Two of the three day trips are short and easy: Andechs is S-Bahn to Herrsching plus a bus or a forty-minute walk uphill; Aying is S-Bahn to Aying with the brewery a few hundred metres from the platform. Bamberg is the long one, and it is worth leaving at seven in the morning.
The trade is time. A car would have added Aying and Bamberg on the same day and cut the walking; without one, the day has a fixed shape and the beer is drunk at the pace the timetable allows. In December, with dark at half four, that turned out to be the right constraint.
Munich in Advent is a city of markets, and the beer gardens shut. The ones that stay open — Augustiner-Keller, Hofbräuhaus, Schneider — are full of people who are not tourists, which is the point of going in December at all.