Kaiserdom Alcohol-Free Beers

Kaiserdom: three centuries of Bamberg brewing

Kaiserdom Specialitäten Brauerei has brewed since 1718 and is the largest of the twelve breweries in Bamberg — the Franconian city so steeped in beer culture that it issued its own purity law in 1489, twenty-seven years before Bavaria’s famous Reinheitsgebot. The brewery has been owned and run by the Wörner family since 1910, now into its fourth generation, and exports worldwide from a city UNESCO lists as a World Heritage Site.

What makes Kaiserdom notable for alcohol-free drinkers is a very concrete investment: in 2019, alongside a new state-of-the-art brewhouse, the family installed its own de-alcoholisation plant. Rather than outsourcing or compromising, Kaiserdom removes the alcohol from fully brewed beer in-house — preserving flavour while hitting 0.0%, and enabling a proper AF range spanning lager and flavoured wheat beers.

The brewery’s origins are genuinely monastic: it began in 1718 as the brewing licence of a tavern belonging to Bamberg’s Benedictine monastery of St Michaelsberg in the village of Gaustadt, granted to innkeeper Georg Morg. Three centuries later Kaiserdom beer is brewed under licence as far afield as China and Sweden — but the AF beers we list are the Bamberg originals.

The company marked its 300th anniversary in 2018 and has since passed management to the next generation of the family — continuity being rather the point in Bamberg, where brewing is less an industry than a civic identity.

Kaiserdom’s lemon and pink grapefruit wheats star in our fruit beer, radler & shandy rundown — case options included.

Kaiserdom’s alcohol-free range on Unhopped

We list three: the clean Kaiserdom Alcohol Free Lager, and two fruit-led wheat beers — Lemon Wheat and Pink Grapefruit Wheat — that lean into the German tradition of the refreshing Radler-style mix. For the wider scene, see our German alcohol-free beer guide.