Weisses Bräuhaus: When Wheat Beer Belonged to the King

Why is it significant?

Here on the Tal, stop in front of the broad old house with the painted lettering, the Weisses Bräuhaus. Through the windows you will see waiters carrying tall, curved glasses of cloudy golden beer with a thick crown of foam, the shape of a vase rather than a mug.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here on the Tal, stop in front of the broad old house with the painted lettering, the Weisses Bräuhaus. Through the windows you will see waiters carrying tall, curved glasses of cloudy golden beer with a thick crown of foam, the shape of a vase rather than a mug.

That is Weissbier, wheat beer, and for a long time ordinary Bavarians were not allowed to brew it. Remember the purity law, barley only? Wheat was the exception, and it was a privilege. First a noble family held the right to brew it, and when that family died out at the start of the seventeenth century, Duke Maximilian the First took it for the ruling house. For well over two centuries, wheat beer was a monopoly of the Bavarian rulers, and a very profitable one. Some historians say its income helped Bavaria pay its way through the Thirty Years' War.

By the nineteenth century, though, Bavarians had fallen for dark lager, and wheat beer looked old-fashioned. The crown was happy to let it go. In 1872 a brewer called Georg Schneider bought the right to brew it from King Ludwig the Second and set up in this house. It was a bet on a dying style... and it won. Today Weissbier is one of the great symbols of Bavaria, and the Schneider family still brews it.

The brewery here in the Tal was destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and production moved to Kelheim on the Danube, to an old wheat beer brewery the family had bought earlier. But the tavern stayed, rebuilt, and it is still the place where Munich comes for a Weissbier and a white sausage.

Which brings us to the Weisswurst. Legend says it was invented on a February morning in 1857, in an inn on Marienplatz, by a butcher who ran out of the thin sheep casings for his fried sausages and used thicker pork casings instead... and, afraid they would burst in the pan, simmered them in hot water. The rules are strict: eat it before the noon bells, peel it, or suck it out of its skin, which locals call zuzeln, and never, ever without sweet mustard. Now walk west along the Tal to the end, and bear left towards the old church tower standing above the roofs.