18 Popular German Drinks You Must Try in Germany

There is a moment in a Cologne brauhaus when you realise nobody has asked you what you want. A waiter in a blue apron simply puts a small glass of beer in front of you, draws a pencil mark on your coaster, and moves on. When that glass is empty another one appears. It keeps happening until you put the coaster on top of the glass, which is the only way to make it stop.

That is the thing about drinking in Germany. It is rarely just a drink. There is usually a glass that has to be the right shape, a region that will argue it invented the thing, and a rule about how you are supposed to hold it.

Germany also has far more range than its reputation suggests. It is the beer country, obviously, but it also produces around 40 percent of the world’s Riesling, drinks more sparkling wine per head than anywhere else on earth, and has a soft drink culture that goes well beyond cola.

So I asked a group of travel writers who know the country to each pick the drink they would order first, and filled in the gaps myself. Here are 18 German drinks worth trying, what to expect from each, and where to find them.

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German Beers

1. Weissbier, and the Bavarian Beer Garden

By Diana from The Globetrotting Detective

Roughly half of Germany’s breweries are in Bavaria, and if you order one thing there, make it a Weissbier. Also called Weizen or Hefeweizen, it is a cloudy wheat beer, unfiltered, poured into a tall curved glass, and it tastes of banana and clove without anyone having added either. That comes from the yeast.

The Munich names to look for are Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner and Spaten, all originally from the city and all still pouring in it. Order a Helles if you want something paler and cleaner, or a Dunkles for the darker malty version. If you get as far as Bamberg, try a Rauchbier, brewed with malt dried over beechwood smoke, which tastes exactly like it sounds and is either the best or worst thing you drink in Germany.

Where you drink it matters as much as what. The beer garden is a Bavarian institution with an unusual rule attached: at traditional ones you are allowed to bring your own food. People turn up with bread, radishes, Obatzda and a pretzel, buy the beer, and stay all afternoon. The Hofbräuhaus in central Munich is the famous one. The ones under the chestnut trees in the Englischer Garten are the better ones.

2. Kölsch, in Cologne

Kölsch is the most tightly defined beer in Germany, and drinking it comes with more etiquette than any other item on this list.

In 1986, 24 breweries in and around Cologne signed the Kölsch Konvention, which set out exactly how the beer had to be made and restricted the name to breweries within about 50 kilometres of the city. In 1997 the EU gave it protected geographical indication status, so Kölsch is protected across Europe the way Champagne is. Brew the same beer in Hamburg or Houston and you have to call it Kölsch-style.

The beer itself is pale, clean, lightly fruity and very easy to drink at around 4.8 to 5.2 percent. It arrives in a Stange, a straight narrow 0.2 litre glass, which sounds stingy and is actually the point: you finish it before it warms up, and a fresh one is already on the way.

The waiter is a Köbes, he carries a ring-shaped tray called a Kranz holding eleven of them, and he will keep swapping your empty for a full one and pencilling a mark on your coaster without ever asking. Früh, Gaffel, Reissdorf and Päffgen are the classic houses, all within walking distance of the cathedral.

3. Altbier, in Düsseldorf

By Dave from Man vs. Globe

Forty-five kilometres up the Rhine from Cologne, Düsseldorf drinks the opposite beer and has done for generations. The two cities have been quietly insulting each other’s brewing since long before either had a football team.

Altbier is darker, maltier and noticeably more bitter than Kölsch. The name means old beer, referring not to age but to the older top-fermenting method, as distinct from the bottom-fermented lagers that took over most of Germany in the nineteenth century. Like Kölsch it comes in a 0.2 litre glass and it keeps coming until you cover it.

Düsseldorf’s Altstadt is known as the longest bar in the world, a compact grid of streets where a startling proportion of the buildings contain a pub. The ones that matter are the handful that still brew on site: Uerige, Füchschen, Schumacher and Schlüssel. Drink Alt at the source in one of those rather than from a bottle anywhere else.

4. Pils

The regional styles get the attention, but Pils is what Germany actually drinks. It is the default beer in most of the country outside Bavaria, Cologne and Düsseldorf, and it is the thing that arrives if you walk into a bar and just say “ein Bier”.

The style came from Pilsen in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, but the German version went its own way: drier, crisper, and more assertively hoppy than its Czech parent. Jever from Friesland is the famously bitter one. Bitburger, Krombacher, Warsteiner and Radeberger are the big national names.

One thing that catches visitors out: a properly poured Pils takes several minutes and arrives with a substantial head. That is deliberate, not neglect, and it is why you sometimes see a glass left on the bar to settle before it reaches you. Wait for it.

5. Berliner Weisse

By Sydney from A World in Reach

A refreshing sour wheat beer that originated in and around Berlin, and one of the few German drinks that will genuinely surprise you.

The origins are murky. Most beer historians place it around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and the competing stories credit either Huguenot refugees arriving from France or the Hannover brewer Cord Broyhan, whose beer influenced a whole family of northern German styles. Nobody has settled it.

What you will be served is a low-alcohol, tart, cloudy beer in a wide bowl-shaped glass, almost always sweetened with a shot of syrup. Ask for it “mit Schuss” and pick your colour: rot for raspberry, or grün for woodruff, a herb that tastes vaguely of hay and vanilla and turns the whole glass an alarming green. Berliner Kindl is the version most bars stock, though a few Berlin craft breweries now make unsweetened traditional versions worth seeking out if you like genuinely sour beer.

6. Radler

By Fiona from Travelling Thirties

Beer mixed with lemonade, roughly half and half, and about as far from a compromise as a lower-alcohol drink gets. Germans of every age drink it without embarrassment, particularly in summer.

The story attached to it is that in 1922, an innkeeper called Franz Kugler in Deisenhofen just south of Munich found his pub swamped by cyclists arriving along a newly opened bike route, realised he was going to run out of beer, and started cutting it with lemonade. He called it Radlermass, cyclist’s litre. Whether that is history or good marketing is anyone’s guess, but the name stuck and shortened to Radler.

You will find it everywhere, on tap and in bottles, usually around 2 to 3 percent. In northern Germany the same idea made with Pils is often called an Alsterwasser instead.

German Wines

7. Riesling

Germany grows around 40 percent of the world’s Riesling, on more than 23,000 hectares, which is the largest area given over to the grape anywhere. If you drink one German wine, this is it.

The reason more visitors do not is the label, which has an undeserved reputation for being impenetrable. It is not, once you know that two separate things are being described.

Ripeness at harvest is the Prädikat. In ascending order: Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Eiswein and Trockenbeerenauslese. The common mistake is reading this as a sweetness scale. It is not, at least not until the top few, which are always sweet because there is simply too much sugar for the yeast to finish the job. A Spätlese can be bone dry.

How sweet it actually tastes is a different word. Trocken means dry. Halbtrocken means off-dry. Feinherb has no legal definition at all and sits somewhere between the two, which is often where the interesting bottles are. If none of those words appears, expect some sweetness held up against very high acidity, which is the classic style and far better with food than it sounds.

Where to drink it: the Mosel for the light, low-alcohol, slate-driven style, and the Rheingau for something fuller and drier. Both are easy trips, from Trier or Koblenz for the Mosel and from Wiesbaden or Rüdesheim for the Rheingau, and estates along both rivers sell direct at prices no shop can match. A bottle also makes one of the best souvenirs to bring home from Germany.

8. Sekt

Germans drink more sparkling wine per head than any other nation on earth. Roughly a fifth of all the sparkling wine produced worldwide is consumed here, and most of it is Sekt.

Be careful with the word, though, because it covers two very different things. Plain “Sekt” does not have to be made from German grapes at all. Most of it is base wine bought in from elsewhere in the EU, tanked to Germany, made fizzy in bulk and sold cheap. It is fine. It is not what you came for.

What you want is Deutscher Sekt, which guarantees German grapes, or better still Deutscher Sekt b.A., which means the wine comes from one of the 13 official growing regions. Best of all is Winzersekt, made by an individual grower from their own fruit, usually bottle-fermented in the same way as Champagne.

Germany’s signature version is Rieslingsekt, and it is genuinely distinctive. The acidity that makes Riesling age so well also makes an excellent sparkling base, and it tastes like nothing coming out of Champagne or Prosecco. A good Winzersekt costs a fraction of decent Champagne and almost none of it leaves the country, which makes it one of the better things to drink while you are here.

9. Apfelwein

By Daniel and Ilona from Top Travel Sights

Frankfurt’s drink, and not really a wine at all despite the name. Apfelwein translates as apple wine, and it is closer to cider than to anything from a vineyard, with two differences that matter.

The first is that it is still rather than sparkling. Producers let the gas escape during fermentation. The second is the fruit: old, low-sugar cider apple varieties, which give it a dry, sharp, faintly sour edge that catches most people off guard on the first mouthful. Locals call it Ebbelwoi or Stöffche.

It has its own glass, the Geripptes, a tumbler cut with diamond ridges that were originally there to give greasy fingers something to grip. It arrives at the table in a blue-grey stoneware jug called a Bembel. If the tartness is too much, ask for it süßgespritzt, cut with lemonade. Purists will look at you. Order it anyway if you prefer it.

Sachsenhausen, on the south bank in Frankfurt, is where the traditional taverns cluster. There is an Apfelwein festival in August.

10. Glühwein

By Chantae from Chantae Was Here

From the end of November until Christmas, Glühwein is what Germany runs on. Hot mulled wine, usually red, spiced with cinnamon, star anise, cloves, sugar and a little orange, and drunk standing up in the cold at a Christmas market.

Some regions make a white version, which is lighter and worth trying if you find it. Order it “mit Schuss” and you get a shot of rum or brandy in it, which is a decision to make carefully at the start of a long evening.

It pairs with everything else at the market: soft pretzels, roasted chestnuts, glazed almonds, bratwurst. The origin story most Germans will tell you is that it began as a way of rescuing wine that was on the turn, heating it and burying the fault under spice, which may or may not be true and is a good story either way.

One practical note: the mug is not free. You pay a deposit of a few euros, refunded when you hand it back, and every market designs its own. Plenty of people keep them, which is why they turn up on lists of souvenirs to bring home from Germany.

German Spirits and Liqueurs

11. Schnaps, Which Is Not What You Think

By Kate from Miss Tourist

Worth clearing something up before you order. If your idea of schnapps is peach or butterscotch, that is an American product: a sweetened liqueur built on neutral grain spirit and flavouring, usually 15 to 25 percent. You will not find it in a German bar, and asking for it will get you a blank look.

German Schnaps, spelled with one p, is a clear unsweetened fruit brandy. Whole fruit is fermented and distilled, nothing is added, and the result is dry, intense and usually 40 percent or more. The generic terms are Obstbrand or Obstler, the latter usually a blend of apples and pears. Single-fruit versions have their own names: Kirschwasser for cherry, Williamsbirne for pear, Zwetschgenwasser for plum, Himbeergeist for raspberry.

The Black Forest is the heartland and Schladerer is the name you will see most. It is drunk as a digestif after a heavy meal, lightly chilled, from a small stemmed tulip glass rather than a shot glass, and sipped rather than knocked back. The word does come from schnappen, to snap, but that describes how people drank rough farm spirit two hundred years ago, not how anyone treats a good bottle now.

12. Korn

The northern half of Germany does not have the orchards for fruit brandy, so it distils grain instead. Korn is the result, and it is close to the national spirit despite being almost unknown abroad.

It is made from fermented cereals, usually rye or wheat, and the rules are strict: no flavourings, no colourings, nothing added. That makes it a clean, faintly grainy, slightly sweet clear spirit, softer than vodka and with more character. Standard Korn is 32 percent. Doppelkorn is 38 percent or above.

The way to drink it is the way northern Germans do: a Herrengedeck, a small glass of Korn alongside a beer, working through both in alternation. Order that in a bar in Hamburg, Bremen or anywhere in Lower Saxony and you will have ordered correctly.

13. Jägermeister and the German Bitters

By Matt from The Travel Blogs

Most people meet Jägermeister at a student party and never revisit it, which is a shame, because in Germany it is a digestif and behaves like one.

Curt Mast, the son of a vinegar maker in Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony, landed on the recipe in 1934. It uses 56 herbs, roots, fruits and spices, macerated in separate batches so that each gives up its oils at its own pace, then blended and rested in oak for up to a year before sugar, caramel and alcohol bring it to 35 percent. The company is still in Wolfenbüttel and still uses the same formula. The name means hunt master, and the stag with the cross between its antlers comes from the legend of Saint Hubertus.

Serve it properly and it is a different drink: straight from the freezer, ice cold, in a small glass, after dinner. The cold flattens the more medicinal notes and lets the sweetness and spice through.

It is also not the only one. Germany has a whole category of Kräuterlikör, herbal bitters, that Germans drink far more of than they do Jäger. Underberg comes in a single-serving bottle wrapped in paper and is taken after a large meal for strictly medicinal reasons that nobody quite believes. Kuemmerling is the other one you will see behind every bar. Both are worth a try, and Underberg’s little bottles pack better than almost anything else you could bring home.

Non-Alcoholic German Drinks

14. Apfelschorle

By Corrine from Reflections Enroute

Apple juice cut roughly half and half with sparkling mineral water. That is the entire recipe, and it is on every menu in the country.

It works because it solves a real problem: juice on its own is too sweet and too heavy to drink with a meal or after exercise, and the water fixes both without making it boring. German children grow up on it and never stop.

Schorle is the general term, so the same treatment gets applied to almost anything. Rhabarberschorle with rhubarb is excellent. Weinschorle, wine with sparkling water, is what people drink at summer festivals when they want to still be standing at the end of the day.

15. Spezi

By Luke from Wild About BC

Cola mixed with orange soda. It sounds like something a nine-year-old would invent and it is genuinely, annoyingly good.

Spezi is popular across Germany and close to compulsory in Bavaria, where it is in every shop, pub and restaurant. The name belongs to Brauhaus Riegele in Augsburg, who registered it back in the 1950s, though in everyday German the word is now used generically for any cola-and-orange mix regardless of who made it. You will see it under other brand names too, so look for something with both Cola and Orange on the label.

Order it cold over ice on a hot day and you will understand. At Oktoberfest it is sometimes the only non-alcoholic option in the tent besides water, which tells you how seriously Bavaria takes it.

16. Eiskaffee

By Cate from My German Vacation

Do not order this expecting an iced coffee. German Eiskaffee is strong cold coffee poured over two scoops of vanilla ice cream, topped with whipped cream and often chocolate sauce or shavings. It arrives with both a straw and a long spoon, sometimes with a biscuit balanced on the side.

You can eat the ice cream in spoonfuls or let it melt into the coffee and drink the whole thing as something sweet and creamy. Both approaches are correct.

It is on menus at cafés and ice cream parlours all summer, and it is closer to a dessert than a drink, which is worth knowing before you order it alongside a cake. Ask for it “mit Schuss” if you want a shot of something in it.

17. Kinderpunsch

By LeAnna from Wander In Germany

Glühwein gets the attention at Christmas markets, but anyone not drinking has an equally good option in the same steaming mug.

Kinderpunsch takes fruit juices, typically orange and cherry, often blended with a tea like hibiscus, then spices them the same way as Glühwein with cinnamon and cloves and simmers everything slowly until the flavours settle into each other. The result is warm, deeply spiced and not remotely a consolation prize.

Every market stall selling Glühwein sells this alongside it, in the same collectable mug with the same deposit. Supermarkets stock it by the bottle through December if you want to take some home.

18. Club-Mate

If you spend any time in Berlin you will notice a brown glass bottle on every second table, in every bar, and stacked by the crate outside every Späti. That is Club-Mate, and it is a genuinely odd thing to have become a cultural marker.

It is a carbonated soft drink made from yerba mate, the South American herb, brewed by a family firm in Franconia. It is barely sweet, quite bitter, tastes faintly of cold tea and smoke, and is heavily caffeinated. Almost nobody likes it on the first bottle. A surprising number of people are on their fourth by the end of the week.

It got its foothold in hacker and club culture in the 2000s, largely because it keeps you awake without the sugar of an energy drink, and spread from there across Berlin and into student towns everywhere. Bars mix it with vodka. Most people drink it straight from the bottle at room temperature.

Try it once. You will know quickly which camp you are in.

Where to Stay in Germany

Most of this list is regional, so where you base yourself decides what you get to drink. Cologne and Düsseldorf are 45 minutes apart by train and let you do Kölsch and Altbier in a single day, which is the fastest way to understand why the two cities wind each other up. Munich covers the Weissbier and beer garden side. Frankfurt is the only place Apfelwein really makes sense, and it is an hour from the Rheingau for Riesling.

In every case, stay in or near the Altstadt. The old breweries and traditional taverns are clustered there, and none of this is a good evening if it ends with a long journey back.

German Drinks: FAQs

Before You Go

One thing worth knowing before you order anything: tap water is not standard in German restaurants, and asking for it can be met with mild confusion. Water arrives bottled, and you will be asked whether you want it mit Gas or ohne. Order accordingly, and expect to pay for it.

If you are travelling elsewhere in Europe on the same trip, our guides to Portuguese drinks, Greek drinks, Italian drinks and French drinks work the same way as this one. And the Europe packing list has the practical side covered, which matters here more than usual if you plan to bring bottles home.