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The beer mat
The groundwood beer mat is an invention from Saxon Switzerland – not by Keller, though, but by the Dresden merchant Robert Sputh (1843–1913). On 25 October 1892 he was granted Imperial patent No. 68499 for “wood felt plates or wood felt mats”, explicitly also as coasters for beer glasses: pressed, dried groundwood pulp from spruce – exactly the material that Friedrich Gottlob Keller had invented. Sputh’s mats were 107 millimetres in diameter, and that is still the standard size today.
The Sputhmühle in the Sebnitztal
The mats were made in the Sputhmühle near Mittelndorf in the Sebnitztal – founded in 1882 as a wood-grinding mill, and from 1904 a proper factory with up to 120 employees, delivering as far afield as Brazil. On 16 March 1937 it burned down; today only ruins remain. In the former Gasthof Mittelndorf, a local association shows an exhibition about the Sputhmühle.
Predecessors and successors
Before that, felt coasters lay under the glasses and soaked up the beer. From around 1880 the Friedrich Horn cardboard factory in Magdeburg-Buckau was already punching out coasters from pasteboard. Mass production began from 1903 in the Black Forest with Casimir Otto Katz. But the groundwood beer mat as we know it today comes from Robert Sputh in the Sebnitztal.
As of: 10/2026
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