5 pubs checked · updated 25 October 2026
The short answer
By claim, the earliest date in Austria is also the earliest anywhere on this site: St Peter Stiftskulinarium in Salzburg dates itself to 803, and 803 dates a poem about the abbey's cellar rather than a counter. By record it is the Griechenbeisl in Vienna, which German Wikipedia says is named in the records in 1447, in a corner house first written of in 1350. By continuity it is the Augustiner Bräu at Mülln, where friars began brewing in 1621 and beer has been sold on the site ever since.
Austria's five houses here are five different institutions, and only two of them started as places to drink. The Augustiner Bräu in Salzburg is a monastery brewery that became a beer hall, and it is the firmest record on this page: a founding year, an order of friars, and a trade in its own beer. The Griechenbeisl is a beisl, the Viennese word for a small neighbourhood tavern, in a house on the Fleischmarkt that the city's records reach back to 1350; it serves Viennese cooking now, and we have not been able to establish from any source whether you can drink there without eating, which is said plainly on its page rather than glossed over. The other three are the reason Austria is instructive. Zum Schwarzen Kameel began as a grocer's and added a wine room two hundred years later; the Esterházykeller tells a siege story of 1683 against a city encyclopedia that dates the cellar to 1808; and St Peter's 803 rests on a Carolingian poem. All three keep pages and pins and none of them is in the ranking, which is what happens when a claimed year dates a shop, a wine store or a verse. A house here is usually older than its counter, and the record that survives is a property record, a monastic one or a trade licence — not a licence to sell drink.
Augustiner Bräu Kloster Mülln is the one to travel for, and the least like a pub in the British sense: you take a stone mug from the rack, rinse it, have it filled from a wooden cask and carry it to a vaulted hall or a chestnut garden seating something like 1,400 people. The friars started brewing in 1621 and the trade has only been broken once, by the war. The Griechenbeisl is the Vienna of the guidebooks — signatures on a wall from Bismarck to Egon Schiele, a room named for the balladeer Augustin who is said to have fallen into a plague pit drunk and climbed out alive — in a house whose corner was first recorded when the Habsburgs had held Vienna for less than a century. Zum Schwarzen Kameel is a few minutes away behind the Graben, and is a delicatessen, a bar and a brasserie in Jugendstil rooms of 1901. The Esterházykeller is a wine cellar off the Haarhof, and St Peter Stiftskulinarium is a dining room in an abbey courtyard with a cocktail bar attached.
Vienna is unusually well served by its own city encyclopedia, which is why two of the dates above come with corrections attached. The Kameel keeps 1618 and the encyclopedia says the merchant Johann Baptist Cameel took the house in 1619 — a year that matters only because the firm held a four-hundredth anniversary. The Esterházykeller is quoted at 1683 in a good deal of travel writing, and a Vienna daily repeated it in April 2026 when new tenants took the place on; the same encyclopedia, written from property and licensing records, dates the cellar to 1808 and wine by the glass to 1828. Neither correction makes a house less interesting. Both are the reason this site prints the claim and the record side by side instead of picking one.
St Peter’s 803 is worth knowing about because it is the furthest any house on oldpubs.com reaches, and because of how little is under it. Alcuin of York, in Charlemagne’s circle, wrote a verse praising the cellar of St Peter’s abbey and the beer in it, and that poem is the founding date. A monastery cellar praised in a poem is not a public drinking house, and the house’s own chronology says as much without meaning to: it has nobility, townspeople and clergy coming in from 1720, and the right to sell beer bought in 1803. So the page carries 803 as the claim, 1720 as the record and no place in the ranking — which is the same treatment the Hofbräuhaus gets in Munich.
Five houses is thin for a country with this much drinking tradition, and the gap is in our research rather than in Austria: the Tyrol, Styria and the wine villages of Lower Austria all have old houses we have not yet worked. The nearest comparison is Germany, where the brewery tap and the Gasthaus tell a similar story — see the oldest pubs in Germany. For how a claim is weighed against a record here, read the methodology; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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Salzburg, Austria
The 803 is the oldest date any house on this site claims, and what it rests on is a poem. Alcuin of York, in Charlemagne's circle, wrote a verse — Carmen CXI in the collection Ernst Dümmler edited for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1881 — praising the cellar of St Peter's abbey and the beer in it. German Wikipedia cites that poem, by way of Andreas Otto Weber's study of monastic wine growing, as the earliest
Vienna, Austria
One of the few houses on this site whose record is older than its claim. The Griechenbeisl says on its own pages that it has been serving guests for 550 years, which puts its founding around 1476; German Wikipedia gives the first documentary mention of the Griechenbeisl as 1447, and the building on the corner as first recorded in 1350. The City of Vienna's own historical encyclopaedia, read on 17 September 2026, is
Vienna, Austria
The house dates itself to 1618 on its own pages, and what 1618 dates is a shop: Johann Baptist Cameel, a merchant who had come to Vienna from Brno, bought a house already standing in the Bognergasse and set up a spice and grocery business, which he named after himself. The City of Vienna's historical encyclopedia puts that a year later, in 1619, and it is worth knowing that the round anniversary the firm kept in
Salzburg, Austria
Augustinian hermits from Munich took over the house at Mülln in 1605 and founded the brewery in 1621, selling their beer first at the friary gate and later through inns bought for the purpose — so drink was sold on these premises from the start. The Augustinians died out in Salzburg in 1818, the buildings served as barracks, and in 1835 the Emperor Ferdinand I passed them to the Benedictines of Michaelbeuern, who
Vienna, Austria
Two Viennese accounts of this cellar disagree, and the city's is the harder one. The house tells the Turkish siege of 1683, when Prince Paul Esterházy's men were given free wine before the fighting; the wall that ran past the Haarhof was not the one the Turks were shooting at, because the city's own archaeological map of the old town puts nothing later than the middle ages at this corner — the Reflertor gate, dated
