Sternquell-Brauerei-Geschäftsführer Jörg Sachse trägt wohlschmeckende Botschaft über die Region hinaus

If somebody is born at a brewery site when his mother delivers the baby at home, his future is really pre-ordained. The brewery is likely to dominate his future life. This could hardly be truer than for Jörg Sachse, who spent his childhood and youth on the site at the Sternquell Brewery on Dobenaustrasse – below the Friedensbrücke (Peace Bridge), the longest stone arch bridge in Europe. The historical beer cellar at the traditional location in the centre of Plauen was the place where he played during his childhood.

The 60-year-old is one of those hearty types, who make no secret of their Vogtland roots. He embodies the down-to-earth attitude of people in this region almost like a text book. Jörg Sachse is now the Managing Director of the Plauen Sternquell Brewery and has not really moved the focal point of his life away from the region – apart from the time spent doing military service and a university course in Berlin. “Of course, Berlin was attractive – you only have to think of the huge cultural landscape, which was organised there in East German times, but this is my home. Sternquell, where my father was the head of the brewery, sent me away to study, so it was really clear that I’d return here,” says Sachse, thinking back to his youth.

“However, the craziest time was when the Berlin Wall fell,” he recalls. “The Sternquell Brewery was in a good state technologically and technically by East German standards – the largest bottling machine in East Germany was here and the bottling hall had just been completed when the Wall came down.”

“When we were a company run by the German privatisation agency, many Western German breweries came to look around. In the end, we set up a joint venture with the Kulmbach Brewery – we were only the second East German brewery to do so;” Sachse is still grateful to his father and his far-sightedness in terms of business management. “On monetary union day, we were able to make use of a new labelling machine. My father went to see Hermann Kronseder, the patriarch of the “Krones” company, and asked him for his help – a demonstration labelling machine was set up in Plauen as a loan and free of charge – providing that we paid for it when we had enough money to do so. It was probably only possible to do this kind of business deal at that time. We’d paid for the machine one year later,” Jörg Sachse recalls. Looking back, he adds, “The fall of the Berlin Wall was a huge challenge. Just imagine, we were selling 670,000 hectolitres of beer every year. After monetary union, our Sternquell beer went out of fashion. People first wanted to drink Western beer, which had become affordable through the D-Mark from one day to the next. We just managed to sell 130,000 hectolitres in 1991.”  The brewery’s output has now settled down; output has been stable for years at a figure of more than 300,000 hectolitres per annum. The company is the leading regional beer in the Chemnitz administrative district, the Vogtland region and eastern Thuringia – and Sternquell beer is also very popular in the Leipzig region – at retailers, where margins are continuing to fall, but also in the catering industry.

“We place great importance on the fact that we have a fair partnership with innkeepers in the local catering industry. If I help out a customer in a difficult situation, he’ll never forget it,” says Sachse, outlining his sales philosophy. He adds, “Technology is a source of pleasure and is enormously important as the foundation, but sales work is simply more attractive, particularly when you sell a sociable, friendly product like ours,” says Sachse, demonstrating his openness to both sides of the “emotional product, beer”.

How does a beer-loving person relax? Jörg Sachse laughs and says, “Perhaps some people have seen me doing my Nordic walking in the Syra Valley in the mornings – I do it regularly with a good friend three times a week. We also have a season ticket for the theatres in Plauen and Bad Elster and enjoy going to top-class sports events – water ball or handball, for example.”

Sachse will reach retirement age in two-and-a-half years’ time. “I’ll carry on drinking beer, look after our house and garden and continue my voluntary commitments like the Rotary Club. I’ll make use of the varied cultural and sports facilities in the Vogtland region and naturally discover the world. We used to travel a lot and still have a few destinations that we really want to see – the Great Wall of China, for instance,” says the head of the brewery. 

Vita Jörg Sachse

• Born on 17 July 1955
• Attended the Friedens School in Plauen
• Final school qualifications at the “Erich Weinert” secondary school in Plauen
  (now Diesterweg grammar school)
• Truck driver at the Sternquell Brewery
• Military serviceStudied food technology at the Humboldt University in Berlin
• 1979 technician at the Sternquell Brewery, research and development,later Deputy Technology Manager
• From 1990: Sales Manager at Sternquell
• Since 2006: Managing Director of the brewery