12 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says 1050. No document from that date has been found.
Grade C · TraditionOldest proof
On record from 1411; the building is dated to about 1590.
Grade C · TraditionBy claim, the oldest pub in Germany is the Klosterschenke at Weltenburg Abbey on the Danube, whose Benedictine brewery advertises 1050 — a date that belongs to the brewery rather than to the baroque courtyard tavern, and that rests on monastic tradition rather than a surviving charter. By evidence it is a different house on a different river: Gasthaus Zum Riesen in Miltenberg, where a court record of 1411 names Conrad Trestram as innkeeper, although the towering half-timbered building there today was raised in 1590.
German drinking history is organised around brewing rights rather than around licences, and that changes what the records look like. A Bavarian village inn is very often a Brauereigasthof, the tap of a brewery housed under the same roof, so what survives in the archive is a grant of the right to brew, a monastic account book, or the name of a house in a property register. Documents of that kind are why the earliest firm date on this page comes from a court record of 1411 rather than from a publican's licence. The monasteries complicate things further. Weltenburg's Benedictines advertise brewing since 1050, a figure repeated everywhere and traceable to tradition rather than to a charter, and it describes the brewery rather than the courtyard where visitors now drink the beer. Germany also offers the clearest example anywhere of a different sort of continuity — a family rather than a building — in the eleven generations of Röhrls at Eilsbrunn.
The German list is short because we have only included houses where something can be checked, and it skews heavily to Bavaria for the same reason: Bavarian brewing archives are unusually good. Gasthaus Zum Riesen holds the earliest surviving record of the lot: the Miltenberg court book of 1411 names Conrad Trestram as its innkeeper. Its own claim is much older, 1158, and its own history page explains why we cannot follow it — the documents that date was drawn from no longer exist. Schlenkerla is the most enjoyable, a smoke-beer tavern in a house first recorded in 1405 whose Rauchbier is still drawn from wooden casks in a lane below the cathedral hill. The Klosterschenke at Weltenburg is the most dramatic, reached by boat through a limestone gorge on the Danube.
Two more houses were added in September 2026 on the same test. Brauerei Spezial stands a few streets from Schlenkerla on the Obere Königstraße and dates itself from a document of 1536 naming the cooper Linhard Großkopf; because that document is about brewing rather than about a counter, the grade rests on the fabric instead, and the Bavarian list of monuments puts the half-timbered front house in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The first landlord we can name held its brewery tavern from 1631. Zum Uerige finally takes this page out of Bavaria: a Düsseldorf Altbier brewery whose own date is 1862, in a house where the Heidelberger Fass was advertising lodging, stabling, wine and food by 1783, and where the drinkers still stand out across the Rheinstraße in fine weather. Three modern accounts date that guest house to 1755; the Düsseldorf chronicler Heinrich Ferber, who worked from the deeds, makes 1755 the year a Pfeilsticker daughter married and brought her husband the house, and says nothing of anyone being served in it.
Germany’s twentieth century makes the fabric question sharper here than almost anywhere. The Hofbräuhaus trades on a brewery founded in 1589 inside a hall of 1896–97 that had to be rebuilt after the war. That does not make it a fake; it makes it a business that is much older than the room it occupies, which is true of a great many pubs on this site. For the same distinction in a neighbouring beer country, see Czechia; for pubs that brew their own, see our list of brewery taps; and for how we weigh fabric against paperwork, the methodology.
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Kelheim-Weltenburg, Bavaria
The abbey advertises brewing since 1050, a date repeated by Wikipedia but resting on monastic tradition rather than a published charter; the date refers to the brewery, not to the present tavern. When the courtyard Klosterschenke first served the public is not documented in the sources checked.
Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg
The Bären calls itself the oldest inn in Germany and dates itself to 1120, the year the dukes of Zähringen founded Freiburg. What 1120 dates is the ground rather than the trade. German Wikipedia and the city's own tourist service both say the foundations, and the three-storey cellar with its arcades and pillars, belong to the manor house of the Zähringer court that stood here before the city did; the cellar can be
Miltenberg, Bavaria
The house calls itself Germany's oldest inn and dates itself to 1158, the year it says Emperor Barbarossa lodged here. Its own history page traces that to an 1865 pamphlet by Dr Ph. Madler, which reported the Hof zum Riesen known from documents by the mid-twelfth century, and adds that the records Madler worked from no longer survive — nor do those behind the royal visits of 1314 and 1368. What survives is the
Bremen, Germany
Bremen's council held the privilege of selling wine from 1330, and an ordinance of 1342 restricted the trade to wine lords the council appointed, which is how the city kept the price and took the duty. The house dates itself from 1405: with the building of the town hall that year the city's wine cellar moved into its vaults to supply the citizens, and two sorts of Rhine wine were poured, the common and the better
Bamberg, Bavaria
The 1405 record is a property matter: the house Zum Blauen Löwen was finally separated from Unter den Störchen and Fritz Vernbach appears as its owner. The brewery's own chronicle places the first documentary mention of the brewhouse as a business in its own right, with its own brewing and serving rights, in 1677/78, and admits the first landlord is disputed — the cupbearer Martin Bachalt or Jakob Schneider; by 1685
Nuremberg, Bavaria
Two dates hang over this house and both are its own. The front page says since 1493, and the chronology behind it dates nothing to that year at all. That chronology opens with old house deeds naming a beer-tap house called the Waizenstüblein in 1431, later taken into the Röslein and still the name of its oldest room, and with the first mention of the Nuremberg sausage kitchen Zu den drei Rosen about 1480. The
Leipzig, Saxony
The cellar sells itself as being there since 1525 and kept a five-hundredth birthday in 2025. What 1525 dates is a story rather than a deed: a folk tale has the magician Johann Georg Faust riding a barrel up out of this cellar in that year, and two panels painted about 1625 and given to Andreas Bretschneider hang in the Goethe room, which shows how old the telling is rather than how old the house is. The wine trade
Bamberg, Bavaria
The house dates itself from a document of 1536 that names the cooper Linhard Großkopf as the founder of the brewing house, and the German Wikipedia article says the same; the name Spezial arrives later, with Nikolas Delscher, called Spicial, who was a brewer and a cooper too. What 1536 dates is brewing, not a counter, so on its own it is no evidence of a drinking house in that year. The earliest account traced of
Munich, Bavaria
The 1589 is the founding of the Bavarian dukes' court brewery, which Duke Wilhelm V set up at the Alter Hof because his household was spending too much on beer brought in from elsewhere; his successor Maximilian I moved the brewing to the Platzl in 1607. Neither was a house serving the public. The City of Munich's own account is plain that ordinary Munich citizens were admitted in 1828, when Ludwig I allowed the
Berlin, Germany
The house was first recorded in 1561, when it was a Wiekhaus — a small dwelling built against the town wall, and the last of them in old Berlin — and the date it prints is 1621, the year a riding groom of the Elector of Brandenburg opened a spirits room on the ground floor. Neither German Wikipedia nor the Berlin readers' site that retells the story names a document behind it, and the second attributes the account
Eilsbrunn, Bavaria
In 1658 Andreas Röhrl married Susanna Hofmeister, daughter of the innkeeper Georg Hofmeister, so the inn was already there, and his family has kept it ever since; Guinness World Records recognised it in 2010 as the oldest continuously family-run inn. The Bavarian monument list, which protects the house under number D-3-75-199-22, describes an eighteenth-century mansard-roofed building whose core is probably older
Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia
The house dates itself from the brewery and not from the inn, which is why the record here is older than the claim. Its own chronicle sets out that on 4 January 1862 the widow Bender sold the Bergischer Hof to the innkeeper and brewer Wilhelm Cürten, who put a brewery in the cellar and the back buildings and was soon serving his own top-fermented beer in the ground-floor rooms; the regulars' word for his temper
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