Christmas Eve at the Oldest Brewery in the World

Christmas Eve marks a confluence of several threads of my holiday spirit. It is when traditional Christmas music reaches its crescendo before the old-time crooners return to their dusty place in the record shelf of my mind to wait patiently for another year to pass. It is the day when the ghosts of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol speak loudest, and when almost all film versions of it beckon me like a warm fireplace. It is when the excitement and buzz of the Christmas season is exchanged with a calmness enforced by the early closing hours as pedestrians retreat to their homes and both shops and restaurants shutter their windows. It is a day to reflect during this brief subsidence in all the Christmas stimuli. In this manner, Christmas is for me a sobering day. It is a day when a touch of seriousness returns after a couple weeks of indulging in the Yuletide euphoria. It is not the giddy awakening like Ebenezer Scrooge finding redemption, but the sober realization that the holiday grace period is over, and it is time to be responsible again. So Christmas Eve for me is like the final carefree moment of the holiday season. When Christmas Eve arrived this past December (2025), I was in the midst of a trip to Munich.

For Germany, December 23 marks the closure of almost all of the Christmas Markets. Munich, though, is a rare German city that still keeps its Christkindlmarkt open for part of the 24th. However, after enjoying a few days in Munich, I had already said my goodbyes to the Christkindlmarkt and wanted to spend the day somewhere new; somewhere cozy where I could channel some final Dickensian Christmas Spirit and embrace the quietude of my thoughts sharing a few Bavarian beers with my inner Jacob Marley before he goes on about forging the chain link by link. I found the ideal stand-in for a Dickensian village in the town of Freising, just an hour away by train from Munich.

Freising is a typical picturesque Bavarian town with colorful buildings, ornate churches, and great places to drink beer. It is a town with high parts and low parts. The main town center sits in the low part with the high parts being the Domberg with the whitewashed St. Maria and St. Korbinian Church and the Weihenstephan Hill capped by the Weihenstephan brewery. Upon arrival, I climbed the steep cobblestone road up the Domberg, visited the church which sat in a wintery silence waiting for the holy day to arrive, and then descended in the eastern part of town. It was around lunch time and already there was a hush over the town. Businesses were starting to close, and it was not difficult to imagine all of the You’ll want the whole day off tomorrow, I suppose and picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December confrontations going on. I had only a few hours before the pubs would follow, so I made my way to the brewery for my lunch reservation.

Bayerische Staatsbrauerei Weihenstephan & Bräu-Stüberl

The Weihenstephan brewery was licensed in 1040 when it was still a Benedictine abbey, giving it a claim as the world’s oldest continuously operating brewery. Christmas Eve lunch at the Bräu-Stüberl was a limited menu of bratwurst and cold potato salad. Not haute cuisine, but tasty and far better than Scrooge’s melancholy dinner and thin gruel. And it went very well with Weihenstephaner’s flagship hefeweißen and a special Winter festbier.

Freisinger Augustiner

As I left the Bräu-Stüberl, a light flurry of snow started to fall enhancing the feeling of serenity and silence that had washed over the town. By the time I arrived at the Freisinger Augustiner, the barmaid was calling for the last round. This is an Augustiner Bräu München pub, so it was the third or fourth time already on my trip that I settled for the classic Edelstoff. The pub was almost empty except for a couple of Scrooges drinking alone like me and a table full of Bavarian feathered hat-wearing fellas looking more ready for an Oktoberfest than celebrating Christmas Eve by getting the plug pulled on their beer drinking outing. I finished my beer and exited with the barmaid holding the door, politely eager to end her shift. If I was lucky, I would still have time to catch one last pub.

Wirtshaus Weißbräu Huber

As I entered Weißbräu Huber, I exhaled in relief when the waiter ushered me quickly to a table and called for a last round. Weißbräu Huber is a beer brewed by Hofbrauhaus Freising, unaffiliated with the Munich brewery. So to my great joy, this was a local Freising beer to cap off my last minute Christmas Eve pub crawl.

Final Remarks

“There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. ”

Excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The scene in Weißbräu Huber could hardly have been more opposite of Fezziwig’s Christmas Eve gala during Scrooge’s apprenticeship days. After a fellow Scrooge who was sitting at the table next to me left, it was just I and a family in the far corner of the room which remained. Meanwhile, the waiter was tidying up as the bartender sorted through some receipts. It was a tranquil scene; one which someday my personal Ghost of Christmas Past might bring me back to and point out that I wasn’t as festive as Old Fezziwig. I would point out to the Ghost that I had a satisfying look on my face as I introvertedly sipped my hefeweißen. That was a great day, I would tell him. I was appreciating the moment. Then the ghost might nod and fly me off to look back at Christmas Eve 2026. But that story has yet to happen. When I woke up Christmas morning in my Munich hotel, there was no clutching at my bed curtains and yelling out the window for a lad to buy the prize goose for the Cratchits. But internally I was still giddy as a schoolboy. I had just spent Christmas Eve at the oldest brewery in the world, and Christmas Day had arrived. Everything was closed in Munich, but there was one ray of Christmas light still gleaming. I could delay the encroachment of seriousness for one more day. And this remaining Christmas beacon was just an hour away across the border in Austria. A place whose Christmas Market stays open until the 26th. It would be my stand-in for the party at Scrooge’s nephew’s house.

Salzburg.