Munich Beer Gardens: What They Are and Where the Big Ones Sit

The rule

What is a beer garden?

The Bavarian beer garden regulation distinguishes between a self-service area and a waited area. Only in the self-service area may you unpack your own bread, radishes and cheese; in the waited part of the very same business you may not. Drinks are excluded either way and always come from the counter. That is the whole rule, and it explains the layout you will see: most of the large places run both areas side by side, often separated by nothing more than a gravel path.

Nobody signs it, because to locals it is obvious. A self-service area is documented for Königlicher Hirschgarten, Augustiner-Keller, Paulaner am Nockherberg, Aumeister, Hofbräukeller am Wiener Platz, Wirtshaus am Bavariapark, Waldwirtschaft Großhesselohe and Biergarten am Viktualienmarkt. For the rest of the gardens this page says nothing rather than guessing, and the filter below shows only the confirmed ones.

The largest beer garden in Europe is not in the city centre

Foto: Martinus KE · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The Königlicher Hirschgarten in Neuhausen-Nymphenburg seats around 8,000 people and is the largest beer garden in Europe. What surprises most visitors is where it is: not in the old town and not in the English Garden, but out in the west of the city, between residential streets and the deer enclosure that gives the park its name. Coming from Nymphenburg Palace you can walk there; it also has an S-Bahn station of its own.

It pours Augustiner, under old chestnut trees that shade most of the ground, and it runs both a waited garden and a self-service area with separate hours. The second largest, at the Chinese Tower in the English Garden, holds about 7,000 and is far better known despite being smaller.

Why the brewery decides where you go

Every Munich beer garden is tied by contract to exactly one brewery, so the choice at the counter is made for you before you arrive. Augustiner supplies the Hirschgarten, the Augustiner-Keller and others; Hofbräu is behind the Chinese Tower and the Aumeister; Paulaner behind the Nockherberg. If you prefer one house over another, filter the list and save yourself the trip.

There is one exception. At the Viktualienmarkt the tap rotates between the six Munich breweries through the year, so what you get depends on when you turn up.

All 24 beer gardens compared

On the numbers: the base is the German Wikipedia beer garden list, which keeps seats, area and brewery in a structured table, cross-checked against the overviews of Abendzeitung München and in-muenchen.de. Where the sources disagree (at the Aumeister, the Menterschwaige and the Leiberheim), the primary figure is used and the discrepancy is recorded. For the Hirschgarten a figure of 11,000 circulates; three independent sources say 8,000, so that is what stands here. Together the 24 gardens hold about 62,800 seats.

Practical notes

The season runs from the first warm days of spring into October, weather permitting. Fixed opening hours are deliberately not listed here: they change per business and per season, and a wrong time is worse than none. Check with the operator before you go.

Two things worth knowing. Beer gardens are not table-service unless you sit in the waited section, so in the self-service part you queue, carry and return your own mug. And a Maß is a litre: order two and you have ordered two litres.

In short

Common questions

Seat figures compiled from the sources named above. Diese Seite auf Deutsch.