3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim the earliest Danish date on this list is 1600, at Weis' Stue on the square under Ribe cathedral — but the year dates the timber frame rather than the drinking, and the listed-building record's plainest mention of a tap room there comes after the town bought the house in 1914 and restored it. By record no Danish house here has a document for trade at the year it gives: Hviids Vinstue in Copenhagen dates itself to 1723 and Skindbuksen to 1728, and no licence has been read for either.
The institution Denmark dates its drinking through is the kro, the roadside inn, and none of the three houses on this page is one — which is the first thing to say about a page this thin. A kro was a licensed house on a road, and the licence was the point: a kongeligt privilegeret kro held the right to serve spirits and lodge travellers, and the privilege was real enough in law that it had to be abolished by name: Danish Wikipedia's account of the kro dates that to 10 May 1912, when the innkeeping act was amended to stop inns using the words kongelig privilegeret or the royal symbols that went with them. What these three are instead is town rooms. A vinstue is a wine room, in practice a cellar bar reached down a few steps, and the Copenhagen one here pours beer and schnapps as readily as wine; a stue is simply a room, and the Ribe house is named for the family that kept it. The dating follows from that. Denmark's listed-building register describes fabric in detail and trade hardly at all, so a Ribe front can be placed at about 1600 and its rooms at 1704 while the question of who was served in them stays open, and the two Copenhagen houses rest on their own accounts and the city's.
Weis’ Stue is the one that looks its age: a timber-framed house on the square below Ribe cathedral, its western bays raised about 1600 on medieval foundations, with a board over the street door lettered for Søren Andersen Weis and dated 1704 and rooms behind it still fitted as they were then. Cecilie Thun sold the house in 1762 to Anders Andersen Weiss, whose family traded here through four generations until they gave up in 1914. One of its two ground-floor rooms is the watch room, where Ribe’s night watchmen are said to have taken a dram between rounds. Hviids Vinstue is the Copenhagen cellar, a few steps down from Kongens Nytorv, dating itself to 1723 — when Nyhavn around the corner was a working harbour — and panelled low and dark in a way that has not been modernised out of it. Skindbuksen is around the corner again in Lille Kongensgade, in the ground floor of a house of 1728, where it began as the tap room of the Grand Café next door.
Only one of these three has an authority behind it. The agency for palaces and culture lists Weis’ Stue as fredet, and the account published through the national encyclopaedia dates the front, the additions, the 1704 interior, the tourist association’s restoration of the front in 1903 and the town’s purchase in 1914 — a great deal of building history and one line about a tap room, which arrives at the end of that sequence rather than the start. That is enough to grade the house B and not enough to rank it, because what we rank is drink-led trade. The two Copenhagen houses have no register entry at all: Hviids gives 1723, Visit Copenhagen repeats it, and no licence has been seen; Skindbuksen gives 1728 on its own history page and Danish Wikipedia’s article on the street records the same, which is a C. The difference between a house that has been dated and a house that has been repeated is set out in the methodology, and the licensing grades behind words like kro are in what is a coaching inn.
Three houses is thin for Denmark, and the gap is a particular one: the country’s oldest drinking is on its roads, not in its capital, and the kroer along them are exactly what this page has none of. Several advertise dates far earlier than anything above, and none has been worked here, so nothing on this page should be read as a verdict on the country. Jutland, Funen and the islands are unresearched, and so is every privileged inn. For a neighbour whose old rooms are also cellars and whose records are better, see the oldest pubs in Germany; for one where the brown café does the same job as a vinstue, the Netherlands. The full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
Coastlines: Natural Earth · Pub locations ©OpenStreetMap contributorsNatural Earth · ©OpenStreetMap contributors
OpenFreeMap · © OpenMapTiles · Data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Map tiles unavailable — showing the outline map.
Ribe, South Denmark
The Danish agency for palaces and culture registers this house as listed, and its account — published through the national encyclopaedia — dates the five western bays of the front to about 1600, with three eastern bays added some decades later, all on the foundations of a medieval house. An article by K. H. Rosenstand in Ripenser-Bladet for December 1917, transcribed on RibeWiki, is the second reading and the more
Copenhagen, Capital Region
Hviids dates itself to 1723 and says its rooms are nearly three hundred years old. The date is repeated everywhere in Copenhagen and nobody who repeats it points at a document; the fullest version, that a pair of French wine merchants were selling here outside the guild and that the trade was made lawful in 1723, is told without a source. What has now been read is the house. Indenforvoldene.dk, which catalogues
Copenhagen, Capital Region
The house dates itself to 1728 and says it began as the tap room of the Grand Café next door, called Café nr. 4 after the street number, and that it has held the ground floor of the building since that building went up. Danish Wikipedia's article on Lille Kongensgade records the same, adding that the nickname came from the cab drivers who waited at Kongens Nytorv in leather over-trousers, and that it became the
The photographs above are other people's work, used under an open licence, or in the public domain. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.
