Romantic Danube -
Celebration of Beer

Hefeweizen is a wheat beer rather than a barley-based one, brewed with at least 50% malted wheat alongside barley, which gives it that distinctive cloudy, pale gold appearance. Unlike the Pilsner you’ll try in Vilshofen or the lagers in Bratislava, it’s unfiltered, left with the yeast still in the glass, which is exactly what “hefe” means in German. The banana and clove notes people often pick up in it come from the specific strain of yeast used, not from any actual fruit or spice, so tasting all three styles across the week gives a genuinely different picture of German-speaking Europe’s brewing range rather than just more of the same beer in different towns.

Germany, Austria and Slovakia all use the euro, so that covers most of the week. Hungary is the exception, since it uses the forint, so it’s worth carrying a little local cash for your day in Budapest, even though some places will accept euros.

The 4 November 2026 departure travels with Chris Gonzalez, a master brewer with over a decade of experience, including a role as Director of Brewing Operations at Figueroa Mountain Brewing Company. He’ll be leading tastings and sharing insight into the beers you’re sampling throughout the week.

Vilshofen is the hometown of Josef Groll, the brewmaster who left for Pilsen in 1842 and ended up creating the world’s first Pilsner there, a beer style that went on to define most of what people now think of as ordinary lager. The BierUnterwelten museum, built into a rediscovered medieval cellar system beneath the town, tells his story alongside Vilshofen’s own 700-year brewing history, and includes a stretch of tunnel that had been forgotten about entirely until it was rediscovered in 2014.

It’s a small brewery built into the cellar of a 17th-century Baroque monastery, still brewing a traditional pilsner-style beer using old-fashioned methods and unfiltered, unpasteurised techniques. The cellar itself is the real draw beyond the beer: vaulted stone ceilings that have barely changed since the building’s monastic days, now home to bubbling fermentation tanks instead of monks.