A village with the inn opposite the church
Memmelsdorf was first mentioned in 1143 and remained a village strung along one road until 1953, when the Lichteneiche settlement was built on the sandy ground south-west of the centre for refugees from the east. The municipality now takes in ten villages and hamlets, among them Merkendorf, three kilometres further east, and Drosendorf, which has a brewery of its own. The old road is still the Hauptstraße, and everything worth seeing is on it or just off it.
The Drei Kronen stands opposite the parish church of Mariä Himmelfahrt, which has held the parish since 1391 and was enlarged and refurnished between 1706 and 1772. The inn's licence goes back to 1457, when a tailor bought the property; the present building went up in 1748 as the Vogtei, the bailiff's house of the prince-bishopric. Behind it is the ice tower, brick Gothic, built around 1880 to store winter ice for the beer.
Inside, the rooms are named for what they hold: the Kachelofenzimmer with its tiled stove, the Gute Stube, the Terrassenzimmer. Upstairs are hotel rooms, most of them converted after 1945 from servants' chambers and in 1973 from the old malt floor. It is an inn that lets rooms, not a hotel that happens to brew. The beer comes up from the brewhouse below.
Schloss Seehof at the end of the road
Ten minutes past the last houses is Schloss Seehof, built between 1684 and 1695 by Antonio Petrini for Marquard Sebastian Schenk von Stauffenberg, prince-bishop of Bamberg, as a summer residence and hunting lodge. It is early Baroque, a square block with four corner pavilions and squat towers, and it was placed to be seen from the road rather than hidden behind trees.
The park was laid out under Lothar Franz von Schönborn in the early eighteenth century, with ponds, cascades and some four hundred figures by Ferdinand Tietz and others. The water came from the Stammberg; when the pipe was cut in 1803, the fountains were drained, and after secularisation most of the figures were sold or destroyed. The cascade was not restored until after 1995.
Nine state rooms are open from April to October, Tuesday to Sunday, and the park is free and always open. Most of the building now houses the Bavarian state office for monument conservation, so the palace is quieter than its size suggests: you can stand in the Rokokosaal and hear the gardeners outside. The chapel on the ground floor is used for weddings.
Getting there, and the other brewery
There is no station. Bus 907 runs from Bamberg's Bahnhof/Ludwigstraße to a stop called Memmelsdorf Markt in about fifteen minutes, and the same line continues to Drosendorf, where Göller has brewed since 1865 at Scheßlitzer Straße 7. If you are driving, the inn has parking and Bamberg is six kilometres west. The ride is short enough that a car is optional, which is not true of most villages around Bamberg.
Göller is smaller and plainer than the Drei Kronen: a village brewery with a Wirtshaus, a beer garden and a shop that sells carp and trout from its own ponds in season. It closes at the start of the week, as village breweries do. Between the two you can eat and drink in Memmelsdorf for two days without ordering the same beer twice.