Duke Wilhelm V wanted his own beer.

Hofbräu München began as a brewery for a household. Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria founded it in 1589 to supply beer to the court, the company says, and English Wikipedia describes it as the brewery of the old ducal residence in Munich; the “Hof” in the name means court. German Wikipedia gives the steps in detail: the first brewmaster, Heimeran Pongratz, was engaged in early September 1589, the building application followed on 27 September, and the brewhouse at the Alter Hof was finished in the spring of 1591.

Wheat beer came next. German Wikipedia records brewing trials for Weißbier in October 1602 and the start of work on a separate white-beer brewhouse in January 1607, on the square that became the Platzl. In 1808 the brewing of brown beer also moved there, and the Platzl became the brewery’s home for most of the nineteenth century.

Two royal decisions shaped what followed. In 1828 King Ludwig I allowed the house to serve the public, the company says, which turned a court brewery into a beer hall open to anyone. In 1852 King Maximilian II transferred the brewery to the Kingdom of Bavaria, English and German Wikipedia say, and it has belonged to the Bavarian state ever since; today it is a Staatsbetrieb, a state enterprise of the Free State of Bavaria, supervised by the Bavarian State Ministry of Finance, according to German Wikipedia.

The brewery’s oldest stories are about strength. English Wikipedia says that in 1612 Elias Pichler, Pongratz’s successor, was asked to brew a stronger beer, the line that later became the Maibock, and that in 1632, during the Thirty Years’ War, beer from the Hofbräuhaus formed part of the tribute Munich paid to Swedish troops.

A crowned monogram and a hall on the Platzl.

The mark is two letters and a crown. German Wikipedia says the HB with crown dates from the time of the Kingdom of Bavaria and was registered in 1879 with the Munich court and the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin, and that it is still the company logo. The company says the “HB” was registered that year to counter copies.

The other half of the identity is a building. By the 1890s the Platzl site was too small to brew on. The company says the last beer was brewed there on 22 May 1896; German Wikipedia says production moved to the Hofbräukeller on Innere Wiener Straße in Haidhausen, with a first brew on 10 August 1896. The old site was rebuilt as a pure beer hall, the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl, which reopened in 1897 in a Neo-Renaissance design by the architect Max Littmann; German Wikipedia says its exterior has been kept since. English Wikipedia also records that on 24 February 1920 the Nazi Party presented its programme at a meeting held in the hall.

The brewery moved again a century later. After a fire on 6 April 1987, a new brewery was built in Riem, on the eastern edge of Munich, and inaugurated on 23 November 1988, German Wikipedia says.

The beers follow the same plain naming. German Wikipedia lists Hofbräu Original, Hofbräu Dunkel and the seasonal Hofbräu Maibock as the main beers, with Original accounting for just over half of sales; English Wikipedia adds a Weißbier and an Oktoberfest beer. At the Oktoberfest the brewery has run its own Hofbräu-Festzelt since 1952, one of the six Munich breweries that serve there, German Wikipedia says; the tent was rebuilt for 1972, when it could hold nearly 10,000 guests. English Wikipedia says the brewery also owns the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl and the Hofbräukeller.

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 state brewery that licenses its beer hall.

The name travels further than the beer. German Wikipedia says Hofbräu began licensing in 1987 with the English brewer Hall & Woodhouse, followed by partners in Finland in 1989 and Hungary in 1993. A franchise business for the beer hall followed: English Wikipedia lists Hofbräuhaus restaurants in Newport, Kentucky (2003), Las Vegas (2004), Pittsburgh (2009), Chicago (2013) and Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2015), and notes that one in Melbourne, opened in 1968, was the first outside Europe. German Wikipedia says the export share passed half of output in 2014 and that the beer is sold in more than forty countries.

Leadership is appointed rather than inherited. German Wikipedia says Albert Riedl led the brewery until 1 September 2000, when Michael Möller succeeded him; both English and German Wikipedia name Jörg Lehmann as the current head.

The name needs a little care. The Hofbräuhaus am Platzl is the beer hall, the Hofbräukeller in Haidhausen is a separate inn and the brewery’s formal name is Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in München, German Wikipedia says. The brewery’s own site is hofbraeu-muenchen.de.

For a design guide, Hofbräu München shows how two letters under a crown, registered in 1879, can carry a state brewery from a ducal court to beer halls on several continents. Compare Paulaner, the Munich brewery that traces itself to the Paulaner friars, and Spaten, the Munich brewery whose spade logo dates from 1884. For this guide we use lozenge blue, crown gold and white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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