Three bratwursts, three rulebooks and one boxing match

Nürnberger: small, and not sorry about it

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The Nürnberger Rostbratwurst is 7 to 9 centimetres long and weighs 20 to 25 grams. That is why nobody orders just one. The local unit is Drei im Weggla, Franconian dialect for three in a roll, with mustard.

The rules are about as tight as its skin, which is sheep casing. Grinding, mixing and filling must all happen inside the city of Nuremberg, not merely somewhere nearby. The EU rules allow up to 35 percent fat and leave the spice mix to each butcher's recipe, but say that marjoram above all is typical.

The best story about its size says butchers passed the sausages through keyholes after closing time. The city's own website says this cannot be confirmed, which is a shame. It does confirm the appetite: the football club 1. FC Nürnberg reportedly sells about 350,000 of them per season. One place to buy them is the butcher Metzgerei Pfettner, in the north of the city since 1927.

Thüringer: long, coarse and looking for a fire

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Now the Thüringer Rostbratwurst. It is 15 to 20 centimetres long and weighs 100 to 150 grams, so one of them outweighs four to seven Nürnberger. The whole production has to happen in the state of Thuringia, which gives its makers more room than Nuremberg's city limits.

It is also the leaner of the two Germans, at about 20 percent fat according to the German consumer testers at Stiftung Warentest: coarsely defatted pork, pork cheeks and sometimes beef. Caraway, marjoram and garlic do the talking. You can buy it raw or scalded (already pre-cooked), which is worth a glance at the pack, and it usually ends up in a bread roll with mustard.

Its proudest historical document is wonderfully unglamorous. In a monastery's accounts in the Thuringian town of Arnstadt, in 1404, someone wrote down "1 Groschen für Bratwurstdärme": one groschen for bratwurst casings. No poem, no feast, just an invoice. Thuringia has built a museum around it. In Erfurt, Thuringia's capital, the grill restaurant Faustfood cooks them over charcoal indoors, which helps in February.

St. Galler: white, mild and veal-heavy

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Cross into Switzerland and the sausage changes colour. A St. Galler Bratwurst is white, because it contains veal and milk and goes through hot water or steam before it ever sees a grill. It is heated to 68 °C, chilled in ice water and sold like that, so at home you only have to give it a browned skin.

The Swiss rulebook is the most exact of the three. The standard mix is about 28 percent back fat, 24 percent veal, 21 percent pork and 27 percent liquid, and at least a quarter of that liquid has to be milk or the same amount as milk powder. With more than half veal in the meat, it may call itself a Kalbsbratwurst. Mace (the lacy outer layer of nutmeg) and pepper are compulsory, and the result tastes mild rather than loud. The size range is generous, from 100 to 300 grams, and the Olma version, named after St. Gallen's autumn fair, is a little larger and heavier than the standard one.

It also has the oldest paper trail of the recipe. The statutes of the St. Gallen butchers' guild mentioned veal, bacon, spices and fresh milk back in 1438, and the producers say little has changed since.

Tradition-minded locals eat it with a St. Galler Bürli, a dark-crusted roll, or a piece of bread, and leave the mustard alone. Try it at the Gemperli sausage stand in St. Gallen's old town, or at the Milchhüsli by the Drei Weieren ponds above the city.

“Mustard with the sausage? Never! A St. Galler doesn't do that.”

So who came first? They settled that in the ring

Four places have a date to show. Erfurt, 1269: researchers found a charter that mentions a hut and a roasting pan on an old bridge, without saying what was being roasted. Nuremberg, 1313: the city's favourite year, although the document describes chopped loin for sausages and never uses the word bratwurst, as Thuringia likes to point out. Regensburg, 1378: a cook is recorded at the Wurstkuchl, a sausage kitchen that calls itself the oldest in the world. Arnstadt, 1404: the invoice for casings, the first time the word itself turns up.

A normal region would hold a conference. In September 2025, a Nuremberg restaurant challenged the German Bratwurst Museum in Mühlhausen to a show fight instead. About 300 people watched, and Thuringia won in the fourth round when the fight was stopped. The compromise: Nuremberg keeps the title of oldest bratwurst kitchen, and Thuringia gets the oldest mention of a bratwurst. St. Gallen stayed out of it.

Three sausages, three ways to ruin them

This part is a reading of the facts above, not an official rule. A Nürnberger is so thin that it has little time to forgive you, so keep turning it and stay close. A raw Thüringer is the opposite: it needs the time to cook through before the outside gets too dark, so check whether yours is raw or scalded before you start. A St. Galler is already heated through, so all it needs is colour. High heat just makes it burst, and then you have lost the juice.

The relatives

Bratwurst has plenty of cousins on this site. Munich's Weisswurst is the other pale one, from veal and back fat. Currywurst is what Berlin does with a sliced sausage and curried ketchup. Austria's Käsekrainer hides pieces of cheese inside, and eastern Switzerland's smoked Schüblig also gets a Bürli.

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