A commoner with the right to brew wheat beer.

Schneider Weisse is a family brewery that has done one thing for more than 150 years. In 1872 Georg Schneider I received the right to brew wheat beer from the Bavarian court brewing office under King Ludwig II, the first commoner to do so, German Wikipedia and the company say. The company says wheat beer had until then been a monopoly of the ruling house, and that Duke Maximilian I founded the first white-beer brewhouse in Kelheim in 1607.

With his son Georg Schneider II, he took over a disused brewery in Munich and began brewing in September 1872 under the name G. Schneider & Sohn, which is still the company’s legal name, the company says. English Wikipedia describes the site as the Weisses Bräuhaus in the Tal, a street in Munich’s old town. The first beer, which the company calls “Mein Original,” is still brewed to the 1872 recipe and is now labelled TAP 7.

The business has passed from one Georg to the next, with one exception. Georg Schneider III took over in 1890. From 1905 his widow, Mathilde Schneider, ran the brewery on behalf of their young son, and the company says that under her it became the largest wheat-beer brewery in southern Germany before the First World War. Georg Schneider IV took over in 1924, Georg Schneider V in 1958, and Georg Schneider VI in 2000, German Wikipedia and the company say.

The move to Kelheim came in two steps. In the late 1920s the family acquired the Weisses Bräuhaus in Kelheim, the brewhouse founded in 1607; German Wikipedia dates the purchase to 1928 and English Wikipedia to 1927. In 1944 bombing destroyed the Munich brewery, and production moved to Kelheim after the war, where it has stayed. English Wikipedia says the US Third Army allowed brewing to resume, at first with weaker beer.

Crossed wheat ears, a historian’s name and a set of numbers.

The brand’s oldest symbol is agricultural. The company says that in 1890 Georg Schneider III registered a logo of two crossed wheat ears in Munich, and it calls this the world’s first registered wheat-beer brand.

Its most famous beer carries a scholar’s name. In 1907 Mathilde Schneider introduced Aventinus, a strong wheat beer named after the Bavarian historian Johannes Aventinus, English Wikipedia and the company say; German Wikipedia calls it the first wheat doppelbock in Bavaria. English Wikipedia records a gold medal at the World Beer Cup in 2014 and silver in 2018, and says the stronger Aventinus Eisbock was first brewed in 2002.

The range is now organised by number. In 2009 Georg Schneider VI renamed the beers to stress a sequence from TAP 1 to TAP 6, English Wikipedia says, with the original as TAP 7; German Wikipedia notes that the word comes from the English for a beer tap. The company lists the Kristall as TAP 2, the alcohol-free as TAP 3, Festweisse as TAP 4, Hopfenweisse as TAP 5 and Aventinus as TAP 6, with TAP 9 for the Eisbock and TAP 11 for a lighter Weisse. TAP 5 has its own story: English Wikipedia says the Hopfenweisse was first brewed in 2008 as a collaboration between Georg Schneider VI and Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery.

The labels are a family matter as well. The company credits Georg Schneider VI with designing the look of its bottle labels, and around 2022 it introduced a redesigned label for the range, saying the beers themselves were unchanged. The company says its fermentation cellar, rebuilt in 1983, kept open fermentation.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all beer names: Orval, Delirium Tremens, Kwak, Augustiner, Hofbräu, Schneider Weisse and Goose Island. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from abbeys and family breweries that still carry an old name to labels that now belong to much larger brewing groups, and a single brand can be poured everywhere from a village café to a bar on another continent.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name, a glass and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A seventh Georg and two new brands.

The family is now in its seventh generation of Georgs. The trade magazine Meininger and Lebensmittel Zeitung reported in 2025 that Georg Schneider VII, a member of the management since December 2022, had taken over from his father, with the handover timed to Germany’s Day of Beer. The change came with a new Hefeweissbier as TAP 1. Georg Schneider VI had introduced his son as the coming successor at the brewery’s 150th anniversary in 2022, Meininger reported.

The brewery is growing by acquisition as well. In January 2026 The Drinks Business and the trade journal Brauwelt reported that Schneider Weisse would take over the Bischofshof and Weltenburger beer brands from Bischofshof of Regensburg, owned by a foundation of the Diocese of Regensburg, from 1 January 2027; brewing is to be concentrated in Kelheim and at the Weltenburg abbey brewery, and the Regensburg site is to close at the end of 2026. Terms were not disclosed.

Schneider also stays in Munich. The old Weisses Bräuhaus in the Tal was renovated in 1988 and 1993 to restore its appearance from before 1905, the company says, and English Wikipedia says it was renamed Schneider Bräuhaus in 2016. German Wikipedia says the company is a founding member of Die Freien Brauer, an association of independent breweries, and exports about a quarter of its output. The name needs care online: “Schneider” is a common German surname, and the brewery’s site is schneider-weisse.de.

For a design guide, Schneider Weisse shows how a family name, a pair of wheat ears and a plain set of numbers can organise a range that runs from an 1872 recipe to collaborations. Compare Erdinger, the wheat-beer brewery of Erding, and Franziskaner, the Munich wheat beer with Ludwig Hohlwein’s friar. For this guide we use wheat gold, Aventinus brown and foam cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Schneider Weisse’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.