Trip · Germany, Belgium, Czechia · planned
The trip this archive has been building towards: fifteen days from Frankfurt, two nights in Bruges and one in Ghent, the long day south split at…
Trip · Germany, Czechia, Austria · February and March 2026
The 2024 trip with the right timings: three nights in Merkendorf above Brauerei Wagner, two with Budvar, three under the Watzmann with Salzburg…
Trip · Germany, Czechia, Italy · November 2024
Sixteen days from 20 November 2024: three nights above a Franconian brewery in Memmelsdorf, two in Plzeň, one with Budvar, two under the Watzmann…
Trip · Germany · October and November 2021
Eighteen days from the end of October 2021, moving every night or two: Bamberg, Nuremberg, a cave hotel in Essing, the mountains above Berchtesgaden…
Trip · Germany, Netherlands, Belgium · February 2020
Seventeen days in February 2020, ten beds, and a loop that started as a list of breweries and ended as a way of travelling: Munich, Bamberg…
Trip · Germany · December 2019
The first of these trips, and the only one without a car: nine nights in a single Munich hotel in December 2019, with day returns to a monastery, a…
City · Czechia
Kout na Šumavě is a village of about 1,100 people in the Chodsko hills, seven kilometres from Domažlice, with a brewery that has been closed twice…
City · Bavaria, Germany
Würzburg is a wine town, and the vineyards begin inside the city boundary. It also brewed, heavily, for centuries: the Hofbräu was founded in 1643…
City · Merkendorf (Memmelsdorf), Germany
Merkendorf is a village of 924 people with two breweries, which is not remarkable in Upper Franconia and is the only reason to come. It joined…
City · Czechia
České Budějovice is the capital of South Bohemia, laid out around one very large square in 1265 where the Vltava meets the Malše. It has tram lines…
City · Memmelsdorf, Germany
Memmelsdorf begins where Bamberg's eastern edge stops: a village of 8,700 people with a church, a prince-bishops' palace and a brewery inn that has…
City · Czechia
Plzeň is a working city of about 188,000 people that changed what the world drinks. Beer has been brewed here since the town was founded in 1295, but…
City · Bavaria, Germany
Berchtesgaden is a market town in a bowl of mountains, with the Watzmann over the roofs and the Königssee twenty minutes down the road. It has brewed…
City · Bavaria, Germany
Nuremberg dug its beer cellars before it built most of its churches. From 1380 the sandstone under the old town was hollowed out for fermentation and…
City · West Flanders, Belgium
Bruges grew rich on the sea, lost the sea when the Zwin silted up, and stayed poor long enough to keep its medieval centre intact. The result is a…
City · Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium
Brussels is a capital that belongs to nobody in particular: French and Dutch, European institutions and a colonial history, a medieval square and a…
City · North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Düsseldorf's Altstadt is half a square kilometre with more than 260 places to eat and drink, which is why it calls itself the longest bar in the…
City · East Flanders, Belgium
Ghent is what Bruges might have been if it had kept working. It is a port, a university city and the capital of East Flanders, with fifty thousand…
City · Bamberg, Germany
Bamberg is a small city on the Regnitz with an old town listed by UNESCO since 1993, built across two arms of the river and up the hill behind them…
City · Bavaria, Germany
Munich is a city of 1.6 million that still drinks as if it were a large village. The old town is small enough to cross on foot, the U-Bahn covers the…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
In Bamberg you can order a beer with two vowels. “A U”, pronounced “a oo”, is the shorthand for Ungespundetes, the unfiltered cellar beer poured at…
Brewery · Merkendorf, Germany
Merkendorf is a village eleven kilometres from Bamberg with two breweries and a neo-Gothic parish church. Wagner has brewed here since 1797, in…
Brewery · České Budějovice, Czechia
Budweiser Budvar is brewed in a town the Germans called Budweis, from water drawn out of an Ice Age aquifer, and lagered for about three months. It…
Brewery · Memmelsdorf, Germany
The Drei Kronen stands opposite the church in Memmelsdorf, which is where a Franconian brewery inn is supposed to stand. The building dates from 1748…
Brewery · Plzeň, Czechia
Every pale lager in the world is descended from this brewery or defined against it. On 5 October 1842 a Bavarian brewer named Josef Groll mashed a…
Brewery · Plzeň-Černice, Czechia
Purkmistr is a brewery, hotel and beer spa in a farmyard on the southern edge of Plzeň, brewing since 2007. The name is the old Czech word for a…
Brewery · Nuremberg, Germany
The house on Bergstraße stands where Nuremberg's red beer was brewed in the Middle Ages, over cellars cut into the sandstone to keep it cold. The…
Brewery · Berchtesgaden, Germany
Berchtesgaden had no brewery of its own until 1645, when the prince-provost bought a property below the castle and built one. The reason was wine: an…
Brewery · Brussels, Belgium
Cantillon has been brewing lambic in the same building since 1900, and almost nothing in it has changed: copper kettles, a coolship in the attic, oak…
Brewery · Bruges, Belgium
The pipeline is the story everyone tells, and it is a good one: 3,276 metres of pipe under the cobbles, carrying beer from the brewery on the…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
Greifenklau stands a short walk uphill from Bamberg's old town, and the climb is part of the order. The brewery has been at Laurenziplatz since 1719…
Brewery · Berkel-Enschot, Netherlands
La Trappe is the Dutch exception in a list of Belgian breweries: a Trappist abbey ten kilometres from Tilburg, just over the border, brewing since…
Brewery · Düsseldorf, Germany
Uerige is a brewery, a pub and a Düsseldorf argument all at once. The house on the corner of Bergerstraße has brewed since 1862, when Wilhelm Cürten…
Brewery · Vleteren, West Flanders, Belgium
Westvleteren is not a brewery visit. It is a Trappist monastery in a flat corner of West Flanders, with a brewery behind a wall, no tours, and a shop…
Brewery · Andechs, Germany
Andechs is a Benedictine monastery on a hill above the Ammersee, a pilgrimage site since 1388 and a brewery since 1455. The beer is Doppelbock Dunkel…
Brewery · Munich, Germany
Augustiner is Munich's oldest brewery, founded by its own account in 1328, and the last of the big six still owned in the city. Since 1996 it has…
Brewery · Aying, Germany
Aying is a village of a few thousand people twenty-five kilometres south-east of Munich with one brewery, founded in 1878 and run by the Inselkammer…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
Fässla has the best-known sign in Bamberg: a dwarf in a green coat and a red cap, rolling a barrel taller than himself. The brewery behind it dates…
Brewery · Munich, Germany
The Hofbräuhaus was built in 1589 to keep a duke's court in beer and opened to the public in 1828. It belongs to the Free State of Bavaria, brews in…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
Klosterbräu has been the oldest brewery in Bamberg for long enough that the claim has stopped being interesting to the people who drink there. It was…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
Bamberg's smoked beer is not a novelty invented for visitors. It is what beer tasted like across Franconia before kilns learned to dry malt without…
Brewery · Munich, Germany
Georg Schneider I was the first commoner allowed to brew wheat beer in Bavaria. He took the right in 1872, bought the abandoned Maderbräu house on…
Brewery · Bamberg, Germany
Spezial is the other smoked beer in Bamberg, and the one the city drinks. The brewery at Obere Königstraße 10 dates from 1536, malts its own barley…