4 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim, the oldest house in Prague is U Krále Brabantského below the Castle steps, which prints 1375 on its front page; by evidence it is U Medvídků in the Old Town, whose building is recorded from 1404 and whose brewery was founded in 1466. The Brabant's own drink-led trade is documented only from 1884, so the two answers are a long way apart here. U Fleků has been brewing on its New Town site since at least 1499, and U Zlatého tygra occupies a medieval house but is documented as a beer hall only from 1816.
Prague's old pubs are documented through property rather than through drink. From the fifteenth century the city's books recorded which burgher houses carried the right to brew, and in the Old and New Towns that right was a valuable, heritable asset — which is why a Prague pub's earliest date is usually the date a brewery was granted or bought rather than the date somebody was first served a beer. Every house here stands within the Prague Heritage Reserve, the protected historic core inscribed as a World Heritage Site, and three of the four are pivnice rather than bars: long shared tables, one beer, a paper tally, and a waiter who brings the next glass before you ask for it. Two of those still brew, one after a gap of almost a century, since U Medvídků's brewhouse closed in 1898 and a small one returned after 1989; the third is the city's most famous Pilsner pub and the one where the tables effectively belong to the regulars. The fourth, across the river in the Lesser Town, is a show tavern with the oldest claim and the youngest record of the four.
Three different things, and the distinction is worth holding onto. 1404 is the first written mention of the house that U Medvídků occupies, beneath which archaeology has found thirteenth-century material. 1466 is the founding of its brewery, by Jan Nedwídek. 1499 is the year brewing began in the house that became U Fleků, traditionally when the maltster Vít Skřemenec acquired it; the Flekovský family who gave it its name did not arrive until 1762. None of those dates is a tavern licence, and Czech sources rarely produce one — which is why we grade on brewing continuity here rather than on licensing.
The three pivnice are worth an evening for different reasons. U Medvídků is the widest and most rambling, with Budvar drawn from cellar tanks in the main hall and a house microbrewery making X-Beer 33 at the other extreme of the strength scale. U Fleků is the busiest and the most theatrical, with accordion music and waiters pressing herb liqueur on unwary visitors, and its single dark lager remains genuinely good. U Zlatého tygra is the smallest, the most guarded and the best place in the city for beer cheese.
U Krále Brabantského sits on Thunovská, on the climb from the Lesser Town to the Castle steps, and belongs to a different tradition from the other three: its evenings are given to a medieval feast with jugglers, fire and swordplay, and the bar is open from eleven for anyone who only wants a beer. It carries 1375 on its own front page and an inscription saying the house has borne the sign of the King of Brabant from time out of mind, which is the sort of wording that dates a sign rather than a licence. The record underneath is nineteenth-century: a landlord bought the business in 1884 and was murdered in it that December, and the story of Wenceslas IV drinking here incognito with his executioner appears to have been the invention of a landlord who took the beer hall on in 1912. The rooms were a meeting place of the Czech underground in the 1960s and 1970s, which is the part of its past nobody made up.
There is a walking order in Prague’s historic beer halls, the national picture is at the oldest pubs in Czechia, and more pubs that brew are gathered under brewery taps.
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Prague, Czechia
The 1375 is the tavern's own — "Otevřeno od roku 1375" stands on its front page — and CzechTourism repeats it on Kudy z nudy, where the house is called one of the oldest almost continuously open inns in Prague. Prague City Tourism calls it one of the oldest pubs in the city but names no year, and nobody cites a record. Pražský deník, writing on 8 May 2021, is the most careful of them: it reads the inscription on
Prague, Czechia
The house is documented in writing from 1404, but that entry names the house of the late Pavel Hubený and has nothing to do with drink: between about 1410 and 1433 his relatives, one of them Nicolaus the soap-boiler, appear to have boiled soap in it. Malt arrives in 1433, when Mikuláš the maltster bought the house and with it, probably, the right to brew, and from 1438 Jakub Starostka brewed here. Jan Nedvídek, who
Prague, Czechia
The house on Křemenec is first named in writing in 1430, when it belonged to a dyer called Petr. The 1499 the brewery gives is the year Vít Skřemenec and his wife Dorota bought the house called At the Two Magpies and began the malting trade in it — a maltster's purchase rather than a tavern licence, which is the house's own wording on its own history page. Brewing has gone on here since, the dark 13-degree lager
Prague, Czechia
The 1816 beer-hall date comes from the pub's own history and no independent record for it was found. Prague City Tourism's account of the house — Gothic, its tower raised in 1514, the walking-tiger relief in place since 1702, renamed At the Golden Tiger by Jan František Lehr in 1786 after being At the Black Lion from 1523 — records a refreshment house here in 1835, Šoch's café, whose regulars included Tyl, Mácha and
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