The garden on the cellar
The garden seats around 350 and is served at the table, which is not universal in Franconia. It lies behind the pub on ground that was once the brewery's beer cellar: three floors of vaults cut into the rock, where beer was stored and cooled with ice from the ponds nearby, under chestnut trees that still shade the tables. The trees are old, the benches simple, and the beer arrives on a tray.
The view is the reason people climb: over the green slope to the Altenburg, with the roofs of the old town below and to the side. It is one of the oldest beer cellars in Bamberg, and the chestnuts do the same work above ground — shade, so the beer stays cool through the summer. The benches face the hill rather than the town, which tells you what the regulars came for.
In winter the same ground hosts Eisstockschießen from November to February, which is the Franconian version of curling and a good reason to climb the hill when the garden is shut. The pub has 80 seats in the old room, 65 in the Laurenzi and 80 in the brewery hall, and the menu covers Schäuferla, Sauerbraten and offal. The offal is not a curiosity here; it is part of the offer, cooked plainly.
A brewery the size of a house
The brewery produces about 990 hectolitres a year, which puts it among the smallest in Bamberg and means the beer is essentially a house product. Three beers run all year: a Lager at 12.4% original wort and 4.9%, a Helles at 11.4% and 4.7%, and a Kellerbier at 12.4% and 4.9%, unfiltered and poured cloudy. The brewery lists the figures for each on its own site, which is more than most places bother to do.
The house was built by Franz Friedrich von Greifenklau, a cathedral canon, in the early eighteenth century, on a site first mentioned in 1585. When he died in 1729 it passed to a brewer, Willibald Mayer, and then through a series of owners until Sigmund Brockard bought it at auction in 1914 for 38,000 marks. The building was in such a state that he brewed elsewhere, at the Riegelhof, until 1919.
Four generations later the family still runs it: Sigmund Brockard and his sister Ulrike Göller, with a small team and no ambitions to grow. The brewhouse was rebuilt at the back of the property in the 1970s, and the plant was replaced again in 2021. What has not changed is the arithmetic: 990 hectolitres, sold within a few kilometres, in a city of eleven breweries.
The year in five beers
Greifenklau's year is worth planning around. January starts with cold-hopped pale bocks, poured for the traditional “Vom Stärk' antrinken” — drinking for strength. March brings a Roter Bock at 16.8% original wort and 7.0%, copper-coloured and malty. May brings Greif-R, a lager with a smoke note, which is as close as this brewery comes to its neighbours' speciality. September is Märzen, and November is the Bockbieranstich with a 16.4% bock at 6.9%.
The result is a brewery that is quiet for most of the year and then has a reason to be visited in every season. The beers are not experimental; they are precise, and the seasonal ones give the regulars something to argue about at the top of the hill. The small output explains the rest: there is no surplus to export, and what is left stays in the city. That is the whole business model, and it has worked since 1914.