One chilly November morning in 1843, Bavarian gendarmes—police—noticed a crowd standing conspicuously on the Isar River Bridge. Scores of journeymen and day laborers crossed that bridge daily, which connected central Munich to the Au, Haidhausen, and Giesing—working-class neighborhoods technically outside the city limits.
Someone had tacked a paper note to one of the bridge’s stones, and those workers had taken notice. There was no signature. The script was untidy, reflecting an undereducated hand, but the message was clear.
Beer was too expensive.
Of course, every beer drinker has heard, and likely shared, a grumble or two about the cost of a pint. But this note wasn’t like that. At the time, the Bavarian government strictly controlled the brewing industry, including an official price that it set twice a year, called the “Biersatz.” And in the fashion of lingering Old World monarchies, criticism of the king or government could mean jail time.
Soon, letters like these began to appear in parks, public squares, and outside the royal Residenz. They were not idle commentary, but acts of defiance that symbolized a growing rift between upper-crust Bavarian society and its marginalized echelons. The messages’ unheeded protest foreshadowed the violence of the following spring.
In early May 1844, thousands of Munich’s soldiers and working-class laborers rioted for three days after the government raised the Biersatz from six to six-and-a-half kreuzer per Maß (about one liter). 33 breweries were severely damaged, as well as government buildings, local bakeries, and butchers. Munich’s unrest reverberated across time and space—sympathetic riots took place throughout Bavaria in the following weeks, and authorities labored for years to prevent further violence. These tensions even fed into Bavaria’s attempted democratic revolution of 1848.
Later, officials tasked with explaining the riot claimed that the price of beer, and that alone, motivated the violence. But such deliberate and sustained anger doesn’t manifest over an 8% price increase. Not in Germany, not anywhere. Events like these riots are invariably about a community’s right to live, prosper, and be heard. The escalating Biersatz offered impetus for members of the working class to express their discontent, a shared injustice around which they could rally.
But the factors that motivated them to march, to resist, and to demand change ran far deeper. Only by stepping back, listening, and internalizing context can we, as outsiders, understand the wells of pent-up anger that erupted over a seemingly isolated or ancillary injustice.
Historians, mostly in Europe, have carefully analyzed the deeper meaning behind this and many other “food riots” that dot centuries of the continent’s history. A dissertation written by Kim Newak Carpenter, however, offers one of very few looks at Munich’s 1844 riot published in English. Her scholarship provided most of the historical details included in this article.
Anonymous letters like the one posted on the Isar Bridge revealed how the Biersatz—a politicized balancing act between the government’s need for revenue, fluctuating grain prices, protectionism for brewers, and excise taxes for special projects like public buildings—became a symbol of working-class discontent. They also sought to express to the government just how difficult a time it was to be an average Joseph in Munich.
On May 1, 1843, the Biersatz jumped to six-and-a-half kreuzer for Summer Lager, a full kreuzer higher than the previous year. A brawl erupted in a working-class tavern that afternoon which the government largely ignored. But the brewers, many of whom operated in those very neighborhoods, did not. They began unofficially selling their beer a little cheaper (the Biersatz constituted a maximum legal price only), but the letters kept appearing.
“Two kreuzer are enough for a beer!” one offered dramatically. Another asked, “What does one expect from a regent who lets his soldiers suffer from lack of food?” Others complained that King Ludwig I had “no love for the poor […] only poorly paid service” and “feeds his building frenzy with the toil of his subjects”—this was the same Ludwig whose marriage had inaugurated the Oktoberfest tradition 30 years before.
The new winter Biersatz of six kreuzer was announced in October, but that was no concession. Winter beer was cheaper to produce and had always cost a little less. So the letters escalated.
“No decent man, no decent family can exist […] all the price hikes are allowed by the government and the king,” one said. Others advocated violence, calling upon Munich’s “Volk” (the soldiers, citizens, and peasants) to depose King Ludwig for raising the Biersatz.
One letter found near the Residenz offered a handy verse—the kind passersby could remember long after gendarmes tore the letter down. “Wollt ihr wohlfeil Bier und Brod, so schlagt einen Herrn König todt”: “If you want affordable beer and bread, beat the king dead.” Outcries like this convinced Ludwig to further reduce the Biersatz to five-and-a-half kreuzer two months later.
Together, such letters painted a picture. Since that first Oktoberfest in 1810, Munich’s population had doubled to over 90,000, not counting seasonal day-laborers who migrated in from the countryside. A majority were journeymen working in construction, lumber, or some other trade—when they worked at all. Despite a frenzy of public and private building projects, there was simply not enough work for all of them. Military service was compulsory for young men, but soldiers were paid so little that they often needed side jobs to get by.
Meanwhile, the government criminalized vagrancy. In its view, any able-bodied man without a stable job must simply be lazy and had no right to live within the city limits. Many took their chances anyway, crowding (illegally) into a southeastern neighborhood called the Thal or else just across the river in the Au or Haidhausen. Today these areas are clean and trendy (and Talstraße has dropped the “h”), but in the 1840s they combined squalor with a surprisingly high cost of living. Most journeymen rented a single room with one tick-infested bed, a window (maybe), and multiple roommates. Wages hovered around 30-45 kreuzer per day, slipping a little more each year. Rent stayed the same.
Beer—as in, a single Maß of beer—cost double their daily rent, but it was vital. Third places, especially breweries and taverns, offered essential refuges from journeymen’s precarious work conditions and suffocating home lives, as well as access to social support networks. Food was everyone’s single largest expense, and beer was the all-important staple of a lower-class diet. It hydrated, filled in gaps in nutrition and caloric intake, and helped dull further appetite. Working class men drank, on average, two to three Maß each day. Often, at least one meal consisted of beer alone.
Working men didn’t just rely on beer, they believed they had a “kruggerechtigkeit”—that is, a right to good and healthy beer. It was a core element of Bavaria’s social contract, and it was binding.
Lowering the Biersatz staved off violence, but emboldened agitators. Letters and seditious table talk in Thal breweries like the Maderbräu (since converted into the Schneider Bräuhaus) continued.
Government officials grew anxious as spring arrived. Ludwig’s daughter Hildegarde was to marry on May 1, with a three-day celebration culminating in a parade through Munich’s decorated streets. They still needed to determine the summer Biersatz. Rising grain costs squeezed brewers, who pressured them to raise the price. The numbers dictated that beer should cost six-and-a-half kreuzer. When the government announced the change in mid-April, it didn’t go over well. Rumors began to circulate that “something would happen on May 1.”
Soon after the announcement, soldiers bragged openly in the Maderbräu that, “When beer costs six-and-a-half kreuzer, the Maderbräu could have what it deserved.” Others in a nearby brewery recalled the previous year’s skirmish, saying, “When the summer cellars are opened, then violence will happen like on May 1 [1843]. In the Au, breweries also must have everything bust up.” Bystanders often nodded in agreement.
The timing only made things worse. Seasonal laborers poured into the city, anticipating work during the summer construction boom. Thousands of Bavarian soldiers joined them as their annual leave took effect. On April 30, the cash-strapped government angered soldiers even further by repealing the Zulage, a small daily subsidy given to each soldier to offset the purchase of beer. An internal report later described this timing as “unfortunate.”
On May 1, Munich was a city filled with expensive beer, thousands of incensed working-class men, and just 115 gendarmes on duty.
The working-class districts waited until after Hildegarde’s wedding that afternoon to act, a sign of deliberation and coordination. As the ceremony concluded, 15 soldiers walked into the Maderbräu and ordered a beer. Three warned that they would only pay six kreuzer, less than the Biersatz. When their unlucky server asked for more, they started to bang their glasses on the table in unison. Three gendarmes, already in the beer hall, attempted to talk them down. Instead, nearby journeymen joined in, accusing the brewer of selling weak beer and threatening to destroy the place. Then came the signal.
Banging became smashing, and tables overturned. The gendarmes left to gather reinforcements, only to find dozens of people already gathered outside. A soldier followed them and announced to the crowd that the beer price had been summarily lowered. Bystanders quickly joined in, and soon the crowd was dragging the Maderbräu’s tables into the street and throwing stones through its windows. Simultaneous disturbances erupted in breweries throughout the Thal, while scores of men poured over the Isar from the Au and Haidhausen.
Roving crowds, hundreds strong, moved from one brewery to the next. Rioters shattered every Maß glass they could find, threw furniture through windows, and poured beer kegs into the street (a few helped themselves first). One brewer reportedly tried to shutter his doors before they arrived. The screaming and jeering crowd surrounded the brewery, then ordered him to “open his doors and not let himself be seen again.” The brewer complied.
The outnumbered gendarmes called for military assistance but received little. When on-duty soldiers approached a crowd ransacking the Bockkeller, for instance, rioters handed them each a beer and toasted them. One Maß later, and the soldiers left without intervening. Indeed, Munich’s rank-and-file soldiers would offer only haphazard assistance during the riots. After all, fellow soldiers made up much of the crowds, and the Zulage had just been revoked.
The unrest persisted into the night, when a 2,000-strong crowd marched on the royal Residenz and Hoftheater, where Ludwig, government officials, and aristocrats were attending more wedding festivities. Some rioters gave speeches, others hurled insults and stones. They shouted that Ludwig had forgotten them, wasted money on public buildings and mistresses, and done nothing to include them in Hildegarde’s wedding. Where, they asked, were the fireworks and other public spectacles? Why had bourgeois homes been decorated with garlands and Bavarian flags, but not theirs? And why did the planned parade route bypass the Thal and every other working-class district?
These were not shallow complaints, not in a near-absolutist monarchy. Ludwig worked hard to portray himself and his family as the paternal embodiment of Bavaria. Neglecting the working class this way suggested that they didn’t belong, just as raising the Biersatz had told them that they didn’t deserve even the basic elements of a Bavarian livelihood.
Gendarmes finally dispersed the crowd shortly after, but the rioters had delivered the day’s message and written their script for the next two.
By morning, Munich’s brewers unanimously agreed to lower the beer price to six kreuzer. But that wasn’t enough anymore. Crowds of journeymen gathered while gendarmes cobbled together patrols and begged for military support.
Around 11 a.m., another group of journeymen and soldiers entered the Maderbräu and tacked an improvised sign on the wall that said: “The Maß for 5 kreuzer. The people have said it, so it’s just. One can live again, otherwise, everything is too expensive.” The six-kreuzer price had expired.
And yet the city remained quiet until that evening, when yet another crowd stormed the Maderbräu. They argued for the five-kreuzer price with the brewer until one of the regular patrons chimed in. The price wasn’t the brewers’ to control, he pleaded, and the riots were just hurting the “unfortunate brewery employees.”
A journeyman responded: “The brewers are getting richer! They have to have our poor money? Beer is simply too expensive, and without beer, we can’t live. We just have to have it! The requests to the king do nothing.” Another joined him, complaining that only wealthy sections of the city had been decorated for Hildegarde’s wedding: “No longer! Yesterday we decorated the city! Yesterday it was fun! We had to make our own celebration.”
A third then added, “The great must see how difficult it is for the little people, how difficult it is [for the working class] to earn something.” Violence resumed soon after, in the Maderbräu and elsewhere. Like the previous night, glasses and windows were shattered, furniture broken. Bakers and butchers joined breweries as targets for the rioters’ wrath. And, like before, the night ended with a march on that evening’s wedding festivities (an opera). Before the authorities could disperse them, the protestors threatened to free all prisoners from the Munich jail, pelted a carriage carrying two senior government officials with stones, and chanted “five kreuzer for a Maß of beer!”
May 3 proved to be more subdued, at least at first. The government had consigned all off-duty soldiers to their barracks, preventing them from marching in the streets. Hildegarde’s wedding parade went on without incident—onlookers cheered the happy couple but looked on coldly when Ludwig rode by. Authorities thought that might be the end of it, but then a crowd of journeymen walked into the Maderbräu again—yes, it was still open for business.
The conciliatory price of six kreuzer per Maß still stood, but on this day, the crowd demanded it be sold for four. When the server refused, they rioted just like the previous night. But with off-duty soldiers contained and a more coordinated response prepared, authorities restored order more easily than before. Violence would not break out again.
Two weeks later, the government would reward each soldier who helped quell the riots with a seven-kreuzer bonus—essentially, Ludwig bought them each a beer.
Subsequent investigations would report the riots as a new “tradition” by which working-class Bavarians “reclaimed […] the protection of their rights from local brewers.” As Carpenter and other scholars have argued, the symbolism of these three days ran far deeper than beer alone, and it reverberated through Munich and Bavaria for years to come.
Before the end of June, at least 25 analogous working-class riots had taken place throughout Bavaria. Most revolved around the beer price and had a common refrain: if the price wasn’t lowered, rioters threatened to “do exactly like they did in Munich!”
For years after, the government announced each new Biersatz with bated breath. They tried a winter price of five-and-a-half kreuzer that fall, and nearly canceled Oktoberfest for security reasons. Three days after the price took effect, with public discontent mounting, Ludwig announced that the royally owned Hofbräuhaus would offer a special “provisional price” of five kreuzer instead. The other brewers had no choice but to follow suit, admitting that they didn’t want to “play games” with their “lives and property.” Soon the Zulage was restored for soldiers as well. Munich authorities would tinker with taxes and laws, forego revenue, and throw various bones to the working class, but they treated the Biersatz with extreme care from then on.
The same thing happened in 1846, when a high summer Biersatz (seven-and-a-quarter kreuzer) led to numerous riot attempts. Heavy-handed gendarmes prevented large-scale unrest, but many brewers still elected to lower their prices as a “precaution.”
Discontent continued for the rest of the decade because its sources continued to be ignored. Munich’s leaders were eager to pin the riot on something simple, like half a kreuzer. That explanation was convenient, easy to understand and manage. It could allow them to treat the rioters as fickle and, when they rejected the lower price, irrational.
But the violence seen in 1844 reflected specific, deliberate grievances. Brewers and government officials were not dragged into the streets. As Carpenter points out, property damage was targeted—rioters left private homes alone and, for all the damage inflicted on breweries, they never destroyed the brewing equipment. Their targets—glasses, furniture, kegs, and windows—all offered symbolic gestures that the Bavarian covenant between brewer and drinker had been violated. Secondary targets reflected the diversity of discontent, and how beer could synthesize broader, interconnected sources of exclusion.
Taking all of this in shows us how the riots were less about cheap beer than workers’ yearning not to be treated as disposable within their own community. The government’s refusal to look beyond the superficial rationale condemned Bavaria to nearly a decade of struggle and agitation, when May 1844 could have started a process of healing. It cost every Bavarian something in the end.
Words by Brian AlbertsIllustrations by Colette Holston
