As someone who has worked with beer professionally, I am very curious as to how this worked.
The most likely answer is that the keg is just a fancy beer bottle cooler and like the schnapps the beers were poured. Having an actual draught beer installation at altitude is a bit complicated due to the pressure of air. In a draught beer the pressure and temperature need to be steady. But on an airplane the pressure is not.
You can experiment on this by cumpling up a pet bottle whilst at the airport. When you get to cruising altitude it will have expanded due to the lowering ambient pressure.
But seeing the hand of the stewardess the top is basically a lid all other functionality is not shown (no bottles in the frame) So it’s meant to evoke a draught beer situation… They have put in effort thought of making those glasses looked like draught beer. They might even have been for the commercial. Carbonated beverages on planes lose their carbonation way more quickly due to the pressure difference.
Edit:
The schanpps is called schinkenhager, which means Skinny or light Ham. In this pariring that is funny.
Interesting, I had no idea that carbonation was a problem on airplanes!
A problem is a big word. Technically a draught beer system could be engineered that takes account of air pressure and controls the CO2 pressure accordingly.
But for all intents and purposes it’s not that feasible to serve draught beer in a plane. But it still would loose carbonization more quickly.
That woman is checking to make sure there’s more where that came from.
Cost of that ticket was probably ten grand in US dollars today
It even says that’s first class (called Senator at Lufthansa that time), so that flight might still cost 10 Grand today.
One really crazy thing I had I my life was being upgraded to first class in a Lufthansa flight to South America in the 90s. Afterwards I checked, the price would have been around 13k German Marks (adjusting 90s DM for inflation that’s about the same in Euro today)
The first thing after boarding was being handed a glass of good French champagne, and serving beer from a barrel shaped contraption wouldn’t have been “out there”.
Edit: Oh looking at the picture again, that’s really not a wooden beer barrel but some kind of barrel shaped container with a lid on top maybe containing a 5 liter pressurized can or so.
Edit2: Damn, I’m down a rabbit hole. Asking chatgpt it said small keg systems were in fact used in airplanes and trains in the 60s, closed system (not dependent on air pressure), driven by CO2 cartridges.
TSA-approved.
