Craft Beer in Munich

February 2026.
Back in Germany with a couple of gig tickets, football tickets, a few sightseeing ideas, and a whole lotta beer which needs to be drunk.

So, without further ado, let's start exploring the Bavarian capital, somewhere I haven't been for a fair few years. 
The central outdoor market seemed as good a place as any to start.  BBC weather had promised me that Munich was replicating the UK's early 2026 rainfall every day forecast, so I figured I'd make the most of the mild and dry conditions on my arrival and sample some helles al-fresco.

Biergarten Viktualienmarkt (Viktualienmarkt 9, 80331 München)
Beer comes from the kiosk where half litre's of pale lager are dispensed at the counter to the left for you to scoop up, before handing your €5.50 to the chap at the counter to the right.  No need for the barrier or any queue on a weekday February afternoon, when there was just enough custom to ensure your beer hadn't been sitting there for too long. 

 

The Viktualienmarkt beer garden rotates through the big Munich brewers every couple of weeks, with barrels of Hacker Pschorr being tapped on this occasion. 
The helles does the job without being especially exciting - a sweet bready golden lager that's lightly carbonated and easy to drink.

Being as it was fairly bright and not raining, I paid my €5 to clamber up the steps of the 91m-high church tower of St Peter's.
(Perfect blue sky the next day, but how was I to know...)

That bit of exercise almost certainly offset the calories of the beer, making it quite acceptable to waste no time in sampling the wares of another of the Munich 'Big Six' breweries.

Augustiner Stammhaus (Neuhauser Str. 27, 80331 München)
On a busy central shopping street, this was the original site of the Augustiner brewery and adjacent beer hall.  It was completely rebuilt between 1896 and 1897 by local architect Emanuel von Seidl to incorporate a restaurant for the newly prosperous folk of the city along with several function rooms and a courtyard garden.
I may only have explored a fraction of the place, but it's a super-impressive cavernous venue: vaulted ceilings, dark wood panels midway up the walls, big tables, and steady buzz of conversation with most tables occupied even if it was far from as busy as it often gets.

I grabbed a stool at one of the huge barrels close to the bar, where my view looked like this...

Then ordered myself the Augustina 'Weissbier', a 5.4% brew which smells of yeast and banana when you get your nose into that frothy head, then tastes of malty bread, citrus and orange peel once you get on with drinking it.

Mmmm...
One great beer from the brewery that many Munich folk will argue is the city's best.
I made a call to the basement WCs which have that annoying feature of an attendant expectant of your euro coins, although - to be fair - they were pristine facilities. 
Then took a quick blurry snap of the front room and the Schäfflerwagenkranz, the ceiling light featuring coopers dancing to ward off the plague...

Then I was on the move, heading towards  one of the city's modern brew pubs...

Schiller Bräu (Schillerstraße 23, 80336 München)
This was a short walk from the haupbahnhof, along a bustling street.  It was founded in 2017 and is shiny and modern inside, featuring brewing coppers on a raised platform in the front window, sleek and smart dining tables on two floors beyond the bar.
They offered three house brews in traditional Munich styles (light or dark lager and wheat beer) plus seasonal bocks and festbiers if you're here at the right time.
I tend to favour a dunkel, so that's what I ordered...not very dark though, is it?

This was at the lighter end of the dunkel colour spectrum - best bitter-looking - with others being stouty black and a fair few disguised completely by being served in ceramic mugs.
Apologies to Schiller for not staying and trying all the beers, but I had other places to visit.

Leaving Schiller, I caught the U1 underground line to Kolumbusplatz, then made the 5-minute walk up Falkenstraße to another modern brew pub.

BrewsLi - Der Biermacher (Taubenstraße 2, 81541 München)
BrewsLi (good name!) is a cool little craft brewpub in a nice neighbourhood.  It's an L-shaped place, with shiny brewing equipment visible just inside the door, sofas and casual seating in the front, regular tables towards the back.  A young chap named Benjamin Saller is the owner and brewer, setting up the 250l brew kit and opening the bar slap bang in the middle of lock down 2020.

The beers are all displayed on skate boards hung above the bar counter - or on an easier to manage piece of paper if you sit at a table.  Eleven in total, including an alcohol-free offering, trad styles, tweaks on trad styles, IPAs and a sour ('Hoppy McTartface').
Prices ranged from €3.90 for 0.3l of the helles to €8.20 for a half litre of the 7% west coast IPA.

I stuck dark with a 5.9% 'Night Draft' 'light' porter...

Brews Li was quiet when I arrived, although a reasonable Tuesday after-work crowd steadily rolled in whilst I was there.  Music was 90% dubious modern hip-hop with Galliano providing a slight jazzy up-turn and Nena's '99 Red Balloons' an unexpected curveball.
Being initially the only person sat at the bar enabled a nice chat with the staff about football and beer.

The porter was followed with a 'DH Helles' 5.4%, a craft twist on the style, dry-hopped with citrussy Krush hops.  Then the 'Top Notch' 5.4% session IPA.

A thumbs-up to Brews Li then, which deserves a place on anyone's Munich beer itinerary.
But I had to move on, with my eye on a little more craft beer to finish my first day in the city.
I hopped aboard a bus that randomly terminated midway through its route, then jumped on this tram...

Tap House (Rosenheimer Str. 108, 81669 München)
Wow!
This was one of the first craft bars to trample into Munich's trad drinking reinheitsgebot territory and serve up all sorts of modern murk.  They do it rather well.
A long bar counter stretches the length of the room to your left when you step through the door.  An arched ceiling gives this a cellar-like feel, painted a murky yellow (is it just UK pubs that discovered olive paint?)

The tap list offered up a hefty choice of 40 beers, the first 18 of which came from Bavarian brewery Camba (from Seeon-Seebruck), owners of the Tap House.
There was too much choice.  Trying everything I'd like would have cost me a pretty penny with the stronger beers perilously close to the €9.00 mark.  And I probably wouldn't have been able to walk in a straight line or find my way back to the hotel either.
Imperial stout from Munich Brew Mafia, limited edition NEIPA from Yankee & Kraut, a Jager Weiss wheat beer...Murphy's Irish stout (? perhaps I'll skip that one)...what to pick?

I opted for Camba's own limited-edition 8.5% collab: 'Zappenduster Imperial Oatmeal Stout'.

 

Then stuck around for the pinsa (tarte flambée) and a murky strong IPA from Frau Gruber.
After which it was time to call it a night.
Turns out you that 8.5% imperial stout is an absolute destroyer when you've been up since 3am in the morning.

More Craft Beer on Malta

Our base for a week sweltering in Malta was Buġibba, on the north-east of the island.
Architecturally, it's a nightmare of modern apartment blocks and busy roads, with a barren area of scrub-land in the middle of the peninsula, home to the town's cats.

On the plus side, you get sunsets...

An authentic megalithic temple in the grounds of the Double Tree hotel...

And a great crest for the local football team...

But, it has to be said that Buġibba isn't really a great destination for the artisan beer enthusiast. 
Cisk is the dominant beer, strangely preferred in bottles or cans in some of the bars.  We saw a fair bit of the Farsons range, from the same brewing conglomerate as Cisk, as well as lots of Guinness, Stella, Heineken, and - the oddly prolific - Charles Wells 'Bombardier'.

Our best local bar turned out to be the Craftsman Tap...

The Craftsman Tap (Triq Il-Port, San Pawl il-Baħar)
An interesting first visit on a Saturday evening found the place thriving with all tables taken in the cool air-conditioned interior, and a gentleman entertaining the masses.
Apologies, I can't credit either the singer in his snazzy suit, nor the owner of the grizzled elbow in my picture. 

I grabbed a Huskie 'IPA', Huskie being the country's lesser-seen craft micro.  

The bar also served two beers from the Sliema brewpub, somewhere we planned to visit ourselves.  But, bizarrely, the handful of English customers served whilst I waited at the bar all opted for cans of Skol.  

The crooning was too loud and drove us outside to the terrace within a couple of songs, darts from Blackpool providing the entertainment on the outdoor TV.

When we returned mid-week, the bar was much quieter, although had a steady succession of locals trotting in to say hello to the staff and sink a couple of beers.
Hits of the 80's on TV proved easier to handle than the live entertainment and we sat inside on uncomfortable cocktail bar stools, back on the Huskie IPA and the same breweries 'Chaos' stout from the bottle fridge.

We needed to travel a little further afield for some more adventurous beer finds.
On Thursday afternoon we caught the bus for the 45 minute ride south, through St Julian's, and on to Sliema.
36°C is probably enough to deter even the most committed of persons on a Curated Cisk Pub Crawl.  It wasn't long before I was grumbling about the sweaty patches engulfing my shirt and my annual summer holiday sunburn incident.

Still up in the thirties in the evening: it was really too hot for wandering around bars, but we tried our best.

The first point of call, on the Sliema waterfront (as long as you ignore the four lanes of road between the buildings and the sea) is Malta's brewpub.

 

The Brew Grill & Brewery (74 The Strand Tas, Tas-Sliema)
Everyone had gravitated towards the seating on the covered terrace out front, although I have no idea what makes people intent to sit outside when it's so hot.  We were initially the only customers inside, where it was a little cooler in the basement room, although it filled up nicely whilst we were there.

Here's the beer list, a couple of the ales unavailable on our visit, although we made light work of making our way through everything else that was on offer.
In fact, we nailed the beer list and finished on Dry Hard Cider (an unwise 8%) and IPArol Spritz (just unwise in general).

My favourite was the APA, although kudos for a quality Bourbon Stout, the bourbon flavours making it taste more like an imperial than the (still quite hefty) 7% that it was.

Hey, I haven't included a shiny brewing equipment picture on the blog for some time...

Making an exit from the brewpub, we branched off into the narrow streets of Sliema to a pub with an exotic-sounding name.

The Salisbury Arms (81 Triq Il-Kbira, Sliema)
Yep, it's English run, will show you Premier League football, and serve you an English breakfast and pint of John Smith's Smooth.

Mrs PropUptheBar splashed out on the grilled swordfish whilst I went for the budget friendly €9.50 Maltese cottage cheese pasta.  An authentic Maltese dish, apparently, and about the only traditional dish I'd be likely to have with the others being very rabbit-orientated.

The TV screens showed local football team Ħamrun Spartans tackling Armenian side Pyunik in a Champions League qualifying match.  Oh, I might have made the effort to go to the ground had I known that was happening.  Although it was stupidly hot to be watching football. Let alone playing it - no idea how they managed to run around in such temperatures.

Right, just time to bring you an unnecessary picture of the WC signage... 

And to search those football scarves hung from the ceiling for one from a decent team.
Ah, there you go! 😊

We had one more pub on our short list to visit on this hot evening.
Which was probably just as well, as all that beer and cider at The Brew had gone to my head. 

Hole in the Wall Bar & Cafe (31 High Street, Sliema)
This building was originally a stables before it was sold and converted to a bar in 1922.
It's certainly a smart and interesting place, proffering coffee, cake, craft beer, and arts and music events.  The Hole in the Wall gets mentioned in most lists of beer places on Malta, although I didn't think it was great as a beer bar.  No taps, just a small selection of cans and bottles in the fridge.

I picked a Stretta 'Pale Ale' in a can, one of the Maltese breweries that had eluded me until this point.
We took our drinks and sat on a table next to the free, multi-game arcade machine and before I knew it I was hooked.
Lots of joystick wiggling trying to remember those special moves on Tekken.

And that proved to be quite enough, thank you very much.
We caught the next bus back to Buġibba - welll...jumped in front of it as it tried to speed past our stop, is more accurate.

Somehow, my capacity for beer regenerated on the bus ride and I thought it was a good idea to pop into Fat Harry's Pub for a nightcap. 
On the busy main square of Buġibba, this was a reasonable English pub, bedecked with all the necessary olde worlde pub tat within, and selling the decent Red Mill Brewing Co IPA on draft.

Here it is in the daytime...

And here it is inside of an evening - all the custom preferring the terrace to the back room with its Bass breweriana and Cisk flags.

 

We had an enjoyable week in Malta, battling the heat to complete a packed itinerary of churches, catacombs, air-raid shelters, megalithic stones, and the odd dip in the sea.
And I think we did a fair job of sampling a few craft beers alongside the Cisk, before catching out flight home.

Cheerio, Malta.

Searching for Craft beer in Valletta

Having given up on waiting for summer to arrive in the UK in 2024, we headed out for a week in Malta where there was ample sunshine and shorts weather.
In fact, it was so hot that I found myself pining for the overcast skies and rain showers of Minehead.  Yep, never happy.

Our first proper excursion with 'craft beer' on the itinerary was to the capital, Valletta.
The hilly streets of the town are strikingly wonderful, a wealth of impressive architecture whichever way you turn.

 

Mrs PropUptheBar is a bit of a WW2 history buff so we had to visit the war museum in St Elmo's fort at the tip of the peninsula (great views from the Bastion, but swelteringly hot).  We were later guided through the fascinating war tunnels (swelteringly hot, even underground).

Here's the view from the bastion, looking across to the controversial modern developments of Sliema on the other side of the bay.  For movie location buffs, the old barracks in the foreground starred as the Turkish jail in Midnight Express.

The temps were such that I worryingly had little enthusiasm for beer.  But a healthy late lunch salad and lots of water put that right, and we headed to The Pub in the middle of the afternoon.

This lady hasn't followed my instructions to act naturally when I take my pub picture.

The Pub (136 Archbishop Street, Valletta)
This small side-street bar is infamous as the place that actor Oliver Reed met his demise.  Reed was filming scenes for Gladiator in Malta in 1999 when he dropped dead after a drinking session with a group of sailors in The Pub on the 2nd May, aged just 61.
The Pub seem quite morbidly proud of this beer bar fatality.

I was pretty underwhelmed by this place when I visited many years ago, but I really quite liked it this time around.  It's small with a total of six tables in the ground floor room, hugging the walls either side with the fabric well-worn on the bench seating.  The bar is decorated throughout with pictures of our aforementioned hellraising actor and insignia of various naval crews that have passed through.

Beers on offer were Farson's 'Blue Label', Cisk, Strongbow, Guinness, and - rather more interesting - Red Mill Brewing Co. 'IPA' and 'Golden Ale'.

Established in 2023, Red Mill aren't quite the micro they appear - they're a craft offshoot of the island's big brewery Farsons, producers of Cisk, alongside their own ales.
That didn't stop me really enjoying the IPA which didn't suffer from over-carbonation or chilling that puts me off keg so often. 

Mrs PropUptheBar realised that the Cathedral was due to shut soon, so I valiantly agreed to stay in the pub and tackle the beers whilst she whizzed away to tick off the Caravaggio.
Therefore, The Pub can legitimately put up one of those 'Husband Creche' A-boards.

We moved on to what was touted as the cities top craft beer spot, appearing most frequently on Untappd.

67 Kapitali (67 Triq l-Ifran Il-Belt Valletta)
This was a comfortable single room corner bar with an unusual counter in that the draft taps were on the outside of it on one side facing the door.
They served 11 lines of beer from Malta's best known independent brewery, Lord Chambray, covering styles ranging from a strawberry sour to stout.  The hot weather made me pick something I'd usually steer well clear of - 'A Toda Velocidad', a Mexican lager packed with lime zest and brewed in collaboration with To Øl.

Our final beer bar in Valletta was a fair way through the streets back towards the barracks and bastion at the edge of the city.

Wild Honey Beer and Bistro House (131 Merchants Street, Valletta)
This was very quiet customer-wise, as we interrupted the barman from tinkering on his phone on a table in the corner.  There were a couple of other people called in whilst we were there, but we really didn't visit when the party was in full swing.

But it's a must-visit when in Valletta, with a good design, great music, a fine beer selection, and friendly staff.
I picked the Lord Chambray 'San Blas' on tap, whilst Mrs PropUptheBar made an excellent choice from the bottle fridge with the Lord Chambray one-off coconut stout.

Then I decided to be decadent and return to the fridge for a bottle of Westvleternen 12.

 

At that point, we hadn't really taken the opportunity to sample the best of the regular Lord Chambray range.  A couple of days later, we traveled north and hopped on the ferry to Gozo, where a visit to the brewery taproom was on the agenda.

Being a bit of a fan of some ancient stones, I was excited by the chance to visit Ggantja on Gozo.  I'd done the stone temples on the SW of Malta back in 2005, and covered a couple more smaller places from Julian Cope's Megalithic European during this week.
But Ggantja is the big one, an awesome complex on a massive scale, of which I don't have a single picture doing it justice. 

We caught the bus from the village of Xaghra down to Victoria, the island capital: overly busy with coachloads of folk, hectic and hot.  The attempt to walk around the walls of the Citadel in the mid-afternoon heat just about finished me off.

Another short bus ride took us to Xewkija, a couple of miles south of Victoria, and home to Lord Chambray on a small agricultural park.

Lord Chambray (Mgarr Road, Ix-Xewkija)
The brewery was set up in 2014 as the first craft brewery in Malta and has since enjoyed a fair bit of success.  Originally a reception area and small tasting area, the front bar has been transformed into a smart tap room over the subsequent years
There is a handy map on the website showing everywhere on the island that stocks their beers, acting as a good guide, although I typically spotted that when I was coming home.

Between us we tried the American pale ale, white IPA, wheat beer, wittbier with local rosemary, and Fungus Rock stout.
All great stuff.  Enjoyed in the air conditioning with a contemporary soundtrack of music I didn't recognise.
The Lord Chambray beers were great, but there was more local craft to be had in Sliema, which is what I'll be waffling on about in the next post.