Hofbräuhaus: Five Centuries of Beer Purity and Power

Why is it significant?

Step into the buzzing stone portal of the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl and take in the clinking of heavy glass litre steins, the smell of warm pretzels, and the booming oompah brass band under vaulted frescoed ceilings.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the buzzing stone portal of the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl and take in the clinking of heavy glass litre steins, the smell of warm pretzels, and the booming oompah brass band under vaulted frescoed ceilings. You are standing inside the world's most famous beer hall, founded in fifteen eighty-nine by Duke Wilhelm the Fifth as the official brewery for the Bavarian royal court.

Look closely at the locked wrought-iron cages lining the hallway: those contain private beer steins belonging to local regulars, or Stammgäste. Families have inherited their personal stein lockers for generations! Bavarian beer owes its legendary quality to the Reinheitsgebot, or Beer Purity Law, decreed by Duke Wilhelm the Fourth in fifteen sixteen, mandating that beer could only be brewed using water, barley, and hops.

But the Hofbräuhaus also holds grim twentieth-century history. On February twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty, an obscure political agitator named Adolf Hitler held a mass rally in the Festsaal upstairs, announcing the twenty-five-point program of the Nazi Party to a boisterous crowd of two thousand listeners.

After World War Two, American soldiers helped rebuild this historic hall. Step back outside onto the Platzl and walk north toward the sprawling palace of the Munich Residenz.