Which is the oldest pub in Sweden?

Of the three houses here, the earliest recorded drinking on premises still standing is the Gothenburg beer hall that opened on 31 August 1900. Pelikan carries an older name — a wine cellar of 1664 — but its rooms date from 1904. Older Swedish claims exist and are not on this page yet.

A beer hall: a plain room selling beer, with little or no cooking behind it. Sweden had hundreds before the 1917 drink ordinance cut what they could pour to weak pilsner, and most shut. We record them under the same label as a German Bierhalle, because the category describes the kind of house rather than the local word.

Why is Pelikan graded C when its date is so specific?

Because the 1664 is a good date for something else. The house's own history has a wine-server opening the cellar Pelikan on Österlånggatan that year, the business moving twice, and the last of it demolished in 1931. Blekingegatan 40 was built in 1904 and took the vacant name in 1969.

Is there really a pub licensed to sell beer and nothing else?

Gothenburg's own visitor service says so of Ölhallen 7:an: a former county governor gave the house leave to serve beer without serving food, and it is the one place in the city that pours beer and sells nothing besides. The exemption is a relic of the rules that closed the other thirteen beer halls around its square.

What about Den Gyldene Freden, which claims 1722?

It is not on this page, and the reason is not its date. This site lists a house only where something published shows that a person can walk in and be served a drink without ordering a meal, and nothing the Freden publishes says that: it advertises a dining room, a private room and a function floor. The question is open rather than answered no.

3 pubs checked · updated 20 September 2026

The oldest pub in Sweden

The short answer

Oldest claim

Pelikan

Says 1664. The first record is 1904.

Grade C · Tradition

Oldest proof

Ölhallen 7:an

On record from 1900; the building is dated to about 1850.

Grade A · Documented

By claim the earliest Swedish year on this list is 1664, at Pelikan in Stockholm — and the house says itself that the year belongs to a wine cellar on Österlånggatan in the old town, three addresses and two and a half centuries from the room a drinker sits in now. By record the earliest drinking on premises still standing is 31 August 1900, when a beer hall opened on Kungstorget in Gothenburg. The two Stockholm houses were both built by the same architect for the same licensing company, in 1904 and 1908.

Sweden's old drinking rooms were built by temperance, which sounds like a joke and is the plain history. From 1865 the towns handed the spirit trade to non-profit companies that took no profit from what they sold, and the Stockholm one, licensed in 1876, put up about thirty houses of its own: good food, strictly regulated brännvin, early closing and three classes of room. Two of the three houses on this page are its work, raised on Blekingegatan and Tjärhovsgatan to the same architect's drawings within four years of each other. The third survives from the system's other half. The drink ordinance of 1917, the rationing scheme Swedes call the Bratt system, confined anything above 3.6 per cent to the state shops and left the ölhall — the beer hall — selling weak pilsner and nothing else; of some three hundred beer and wine rooms trading in the first decades of the century, a dozen were left by the 1970s. What that history costs a researcher is the ordinary kind of old pub. What it gives is unusually good paper: a licence moved from one house to another, an architect's name, a company's minutes. The years on this page are early twentieth-century years, and they are better evidenced than most of the medieval ones on this site.

A Gothenburg beer hall and two Stockholm houses of the same company

Ölhallen 7:an is one room at the corner of Kungstorget, with bentwood chairs, marble tables and a red and white tiled floor, and it opened on the last day of August 1900 under a waiter named August Andersson. His widow Alida ran it from his death in 1913 until she retired in 1941, their son and then their grandson after her, and it left the family only in 1981. Fourteen beer halls and wine rooms stood around that square when it opened; it is the last of them. Kvarnen is the opposite kind of room — a hall on Södermalm with arched windows and a ceiling two storeys up, opened in 1908 as Grå Kvarn on a serving right carried over from a cellar on Götgatan that closed the same year. Pelikan, ten minutes further south, is its near twin: built in 1904 by the same company and the same architect, trading for sixty-five years as Port Arthur, and given the older name of a demolished house in 1969.

The company that built two of them

Stockholms utskänkningsaktiebolag is the reason this page looks the way it does. Licensed in 1876 to sell spirits in the city, it was a public-benefit company rooted in the temperance movement, which is a stranger thing than it sounds: it existed to take the profit out of drink, fed its customers deliberately well, regulated what it poured, and shut early to improve them. It ran about thirty houses, numbered at first and later named — Grå Kvarn, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Mäster Anders — and at the turn of the century it began building its own. Sam Kjellberg drew five of them, including Blekingegatan 40 and Tjärhovsgatan 4, which are two thirds of this page. That is why both rows can name a year with confidence and neither needs a legend: the year a company raises a building for one purpose is the kind of fact that leaves records, which is more than can be said for most of the claims in the top 100 oldest pubs.

A licence is better evidence than a beam

Nothing on this page is medieval and nothing on it is doubtful, and the two facts are the same fact. A house whose year comes from a transferred licence, an architect’s commission or a printed local history can be checked; a house whose year comes from the date carved over its door usually cannot, which is the argument set out in how historians date an old pub. Sweden’s own drinking law then did the sorting: the 1917 ordinance took the strong drink out of the beer halls, and the ones that survived did so as licensed businesses with paperwork rather than as inns with stories. The Gothenburg room survives on an exemption granted by a named official. Kvarnen survives because a company bought one house’s right to pour and moved it four streets. Both are grade A here, and neither claims anything older than its own building.

What is missing here

Three houses is a start, not a survey. Stockholm alone has older candidates: Den Gyldene Freden on Österlånggatan, which has traded under that name at that address since 1722 apart from a gap in the 1890s, and Zum Franziskaner, whose own site claims 1889 while a rumour of 1421 circulates that nobody publishes as fact. Both are held back on the same question — whether a drink is served without a meal — and neither is held back on its date. Beyond the two cities, the gästgivaregårdar of the old post roads are entirely unworked here, and so is every beer hall that closed after 1917, which is most of them. For the nearest comparison, where the drinking rooms are also twentieth-century and the records also come from encyclopaedias rather than archives, see the oldest pubs in Norway. How each year on this page was tested is set out in the methodology.

SwedenCities

Open the full map

The contenders, oldest claim first

ClaimProof

Pelikan
Grade C
Stockholm, Sweden
The 1664 the house prints belongs to another building in another part of Stockholm, and the house says so itself. Its history page has the wine-server Hans Georg Cron opening the cellar Pelikan on Österlånggatan in the old town in 1664, the krog moving to Svartmangatan in 1720 and on to Brunnsbacken by Slussen in 1733, where it traded for nearly two hundred years until the block came down in 1931. These rooms are a
Claims 1664; first recorded 1904; building c.1904.
Ölhallen 7:an
Grade A
Gothenburg, Västra Götaland
The 1900 is not the house's own account but a printed one. Swedish Wikipedia, following a 1994 history of the beer hall by Andersson and Larsson, gives the opening as Monday 31 August 1900, in the new shop block at the corner of the square, and names the founder: August Andersson, who had waited at another Gothenburg inn on Basargatan. His widow Alida ran it from his death in 1913 until she retired in 1941, their
Locally dated 1900; first recorded 1900; building c.1850.
Kvarnen
Grade A
Stockholm, Sweden
The 1908 is the house's own and nothing traced contradicts it: its chronology has building begun on Tjärhovsgatan in 1906 and the centenary kept in October 2008. Swedish Wikipedia supplies what the house leaves out - that it opened as Grå Kvarn, one of some thirty houses belonging to Stockholms utskänkningsaktiebolag, the company licensed from 1876 to sell spirits in the city; that Sam Kjellberg designed it, as he
Claims 1908; first recorded 1908; building c.1908.

Photo credits

Common questions

Which is the oldest pub in Sweden?: Of the three houses here, the earliest recorded drinking on premises still standing is the Gothenburg beer hall that opened on 31 August 1900. Pelikan carries an older name — a wine cellar of 1664 — but its rooms date from 1904. Older Swedish claims exist and are not on this page yet.
What is an ölhall?: A beer hall: a plain room selling beer, with little or no cooking behind it. Sweden had hundreds before the 1917 drink ordinance cut what they could pour to weak pilsner, and most shut. We record them under the same label as a German Bierhalle, because the category describes the kind of house rather than the local word.
Why is Pelikan graded C when its date is so specific?: Because the 1664 is a good date for something else. The house's own history has a wine-server opening the cellar Pelikan on Österlånggatan that year, the business moving twice, and the last of it demolished in 1931. Blekingegatan 40 was built in 1904 and took the vacant name in 1969.
Is there really a pub licensed to sell beer and nothing else?: Gothenburg's own visitor service says so of Ölhallen 7:an: a former county governor gave the house leave to serve beer without serving food, and it is the one place in the city that pours beer and sells nothing besides. The exemption is a relic of the rules that closed the other thirteen beer halls around its square.
What about Den Gyldene Freden, which claims 1722?: It is not on this page, and the reason is not its date. This site lists a house only where something published shows that a person can walk in and be served a drink without ordering a meal, and nothing the Freden publishes says that: it advertises a dining room, a private room and a function floor. The question is open rather than answered no.