More Than 400 Years Of Beer Hall Culture

The Oktoberfest has been attracting beer lovers for more than 200 years. If you thought that's impressive think again: another Munich beer culture landmark – the Hofbraeuhaus – has been doing that for twice as long.



Every week for the last 62 years Andre Bandel has enjoyed a drink at the landmark Munich beer hall, the Hofbraeuhaus. "I always sit at the same table," the 82-year-old says. In his traditional Bavarian costume and his white beard, you can immediately spot him in the main hall of the cavernous building. "You get to meet the entire world in the Hofbraeuhaus," he says, explaining his love for the place, now marking its 425th birthday.



Seated at a long wooden table, Bandel is about to dig into a bowl of liver dumpling soup - and of course one liter of beer in his own stein. Bandel is one of 616 regular guests who drink their beer from steins reserved for their lips only. Directly to the left of the entrance there is a padlocked cupboard with shelves containing the one-liter mugs. There are some genuine treasures to be found there, with some of the steins more than 100 years old. "For many, having a space for one's own stein is better than winning the lottery," says Hofbraeuhaus spokesman Stefan Hempl. Considering that the beer hall has 3,500 regulars, the waiting list for a spot on the shelf is a long one. The lease for the spot in itself is cheap - just 4 euros (5 dollars) per year, paid in cash to the beer hall.



More than thirst quenching



Many of the regulars don't pay cash for their beer, instead using specially produced tokens. A guest who buys 10 tokens gets another one free of charge, as a bonus. It was in this manner that the patrons paid for their beers in the brewery's earliest years. Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V founded the brewery in 1589 in a bid to save state money. Up until then, the royal court had imported its beer from a distant part of Germany, the town of Einbeck in Lower Saxony. "That was incredibly expensive, and so having his own brew-house was a measure to ward off state bankruptcy," Hempl said.



Very quickly there was a thirst for the duke's beer far beyond Bavaria's borders. When, during the Thirty Years War (1618-48), the Swedes besieged Munich, they let themselves be bought off not with money, but with 362 pails of strong bock beer. Some 200 years later, the beer became useful again, when the Munich opera house caught fire. "In the winter of 1823 the water needed to fight the blaze was frozen," Hempl said. So beer was brought in large buckets from the Hofbraeuhaus to save the opera house from destruction.



In 1852, the brewery ceased being the property of the monarch's household and became an asset controlled by the Bavarian state government. The 1.9 million liters of beer tapped each year in the Hofbraeuhaus are still helping to fill Bavarian state coffers.



Just the other evening, sitting at one of the more than a century-old wooden tables in the Schwemme, the core area of the beer hall, was a group of powerfully built American tourists. "We came here straight from the airport," one of them says as the group happily banged their glass mugs together in a toast, taking pictures on their smart-phones. "We could hardly wait to get here."



A mirage in the desert



In fact, American fans of Bavaria's beer culture can also visit a Hofbraeuhaus in Las Vegas bang in the middle of a desert. It is one of seven licensed replicas of the Munich original found on three continents. "The facade of the new building in Las Vegas looks exactly like the one here," Hemple says. Every beer served there comes from the Munich brewery.



Hempl denies suggestions that the Munich Hofbraeuhaus now only exists to amuse foreign tourists. "This is authentic Bavarian culture," he says. Now that the entertainment is focused on lively brass band music, it is bringing more and more young Munich natives back to the pleasures of the beer hall. Hempl says the mix of locals and tourists is about evenly balanced.



All the same, the stream of tourists from every corner of the globe remains unbroken. "Now and then, a guest may walk off with one of our mugs as a souvenir," Hempl says. But it has also been known to happen that many a mug thief, plagued by a bad conscience, has sent the mug back - sometimes even many decades later.