Augustiner-Keller

Ask any Münchner where to drink beer, and they'll say Augustiner. Not the tourist-packed Hofbräuhaus, not one of the flashy beer halls in the centre — Augustiner. The brewery was founded in 1328 by Augustinian monks, making it Munich's oldest independent brewery, and its beer garden on Arnulfstrasse has been open since 1812. The brewery doesn't advertise. It doesn't make light beer or flavoured varieties. It doesn't need to. Augustiner is Munich's beer, and everyone here knows it.

The Augustiner-Keller beer garden sprawls beneath ancient chestnut trees just west of the Hauptbahnhof, with roughly 5,000 seats split between self-service and table-service areas. The beer is still tapped from traditional wooden barrels — Holzfässer — which Augustiner devotees insist produces a noticeably smoother, slightly sweeter flavour than draught from modern steel kegs. Whether this is scientific fact or beer-garden mythology is a debate best had after your second litre.

What sets Augustiner apart from Munich's other five major breweries is its ownership structure. In 1996, Edith Haberland Wagner bequeathed her majority shareholding to a foundation, ensuring the brewery would remain independent and locally owned — the only one of Munich's Big Six to do so. While Löwenbräu, Spaten, and Paulaner are all owned by multinational conglomerates, Augustiner answers to nobody but Munich.

The monks who started it all supplied beer to the Wittelsbach royal family for 261 years until Duke Wilhelm V got tired of paying them and founded his own brewery in 1589 — the Hofbräuhaus. In a beautiful twist of history, the monks' brewery outlasted the duke's by centuries in popular affection. The Augustiner-Keller on a warm evening, with the smell of grilled Steckerlfisch drifting between the chestnut trees and the satisfying thunk of wooden barrel taps, is as close to a secular church as Munich gets.