Augustiner-Keller, Munich

Augustiner-Keller is a long-established restaurant and beer garden in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district, serving beer from Augustiner-Bräu, Munich’s oldest brewery. Its story reaches back to 1812, when the site appeared on a city plan as a place for storing beer. By 1842, it had become a garden serving food and drink, and Georg Knorr took over the restaurant that year.

The name changed to Knorrkeller, before the present name arrived in 1880 after Josef Wagner acquired the property in 1862. A major rebuilding in 1896 created a beer garden accommodating up to 5,000 people, along with a festival hall and kitchen. Among the most unusual features was the beer ox: during the nineteenth century, an ox walking in circles powered a winch that brought beer barrels up from the cellar. That practice ended in 1891.