The town under the fortress
The Main makes a wide bend here and the old town sits inside it, with the Marienberg fortress on the opposite bank. Everything worth seeing is within a twenty-minute walk: the Marktplatz with the Falkenhaus and the Marienkapelle, the cathedral, the Neumünster, and the Residenz, built for the prince-bishops from 1720 to 1744 to Balthasar Neumann's plans and inscribed by UNESCO in 1981. The Residenz stands east of the centre, a fifteen-minute walk through the pedestrian zone, and it takes a morning.
The Alte Mainbrücke is the hinge of the town. Construction began in 1476, it remained the only river crossing until 1886, and stone figures of saints and bishops line both parapets. In summer it turns into a bar: wine is sold by the glass and drunk standing up, with the fortress above and the river below. Nobody moves you along. The figures went up in the eighteenth century, in imitation of Prague's Charles Bridge, and they have been looking at the river ever since.
Below the bridge the riverside path runs south into the Burkard quarter, where the Goldene Gans beer garden stands beneath the arches. Above it the path climbs to the Käppele, the pilgrimage church that looks small from the Marktplatz and turns out to be a long staircase and a chapel on the hill. The last stretch is steep, and the terrace at the top looks back over the whole bend of the river.
Beer under the wine
The Würzburger Hofbräu was founded in 1643 by Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp von Schönborn and describes itself as the oldest company in the city; his crown still sits in the brewery's star logo. In the nineteenth century it exported to the United States, and in 1852 Würzburg still counted twelve breweries. When the beer price rose in 1866 and again in 1872, the town rioted. The brewery belongs to the Kulmbacher group, which bought it in 2005, and it still supplies most of the taps in the city.
What remains is small and specific. The Hofbräu, now part of Kulmbacher, brews Würzburger Hofbräu, Sternla and Keiler, and pours them in its Keller in Zellerau beside the brewhouse. The Goldene Gans, a brewpub by the old bridge, serves its own beer only in the garden. The SMaSH Brewing Project and Maischerei Mayr & Müller work at the other end of the scale. Between them they cover the range, from a brewery owned by a group to two men with a kettle and a rented room.
Twenty kilometres south-east, Ochsenfurt keeps two family breweries: Kauzen-Bräu, founded in 1809 in the Kastenhof, and Oechsner. Both are country breweries of the kind Franconia still has in numbers, and both are a short train ride from Würzburg. Neither is a museum; the beer goes out to the villages around them. The old town between them is small, and the walk along the Main is the best part of the trip.
The Keller in Zellerau
The Hofbräukeller is not in the old town. It stands at Jägerstraße 17 in Zellerau, on the far side of the river, next to the brewery, with its own free car park — a detail that matters, because parking in the centre is a matter of luck. Inside there is room for more than five hundred; the garden adds another 250 seats. From the Marktplatz it is a walk across the old bridge and along the river, twenty minutes at an easy pace.
Sunday is the best day to go. The Keller opens at eleven for Frühschoppen, and on the first Sunday of the month there is live music from ten with a Weißwurst breakfast. On other days it opens at twelve and the kitchen runs through the afternoon. The room is plain, the service is quick, and the beer arrives cold. The Keller is the brewery's own, a few steps from the brewhouse, so the beer has less distance to travel than in the centre.
Since 2026 the brewmaster leads tours on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. You tap a keg yourself before walking through the brewhouse, the storage hall and the bottling line, then come back to the Keller for five more beers on a tasting board. It is not a drop-in arrangement; book before you go. It is the only way to see the brewhouse from the inside; the Keller itself is open to anyone.