About

These tours are run by the author of a history of Munich, five years in the writing and not yet finished.

The book is Munich: How Beer, Power and Faith Built a City, and its argument is that those three are a single story here. You cannot explain the breweries without the monasteries, or the monasteries without the dukes. Writing it has meant years in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and the Stadtarchiv München, and it has meant collecting: maps, prints, ordinances, the printed record of the city, bought one piece at a time from antiquarian dealers across Germany.

Somewhere in that work a pattern became impossible to ignore. Most of what visitors are told on the street is not what the archives say. Not lies, exactly. Stories repeated so often they hardened into fact. The water myth. The beer law. Half of what gets said about the breweries. Correcting them turned out to be far more interesting than repeating them, because the true version is almost always the better story.

So these are not tours with a script. Three walks through the city, each one answerable, each one built from what the record actually says. Groups stop at twelve, which is as many people as can stand around a single page and still see it.