"A 120-acre historic farm in Washington County that is now a brewery, cafe, and sausage shop." That's how Visit Washington County describes Old Germantown, and it's a strange way to talk about a place people keep calling new. Ask around and you'll hear it mentioned the same way you'd mention any recent opening: have you tried the pizza yet, have you seen the beer garden. But Old Germantown isn't new. Neither is the coffee shop on the roundabout everyone's suddenly discovering, or the park where the whole town shows up in late September for beer and German music. What's changed this fall isn't the town's inventory of buildings. It's which old ones are getting used again.
If you've lived in Germantown for a while, you've probably driven past all three of these spots for years without registering what they were. This fall is a good time to notice.
The Schoolhouse on the Roundabout
Kaffeehaus sits at W140N10393 Fond du Lac Ave, right on one corner of the roundabout, which is either a convenient location or an awkward one depending on which reviewer you ask. What isn't in dispute is the building itself. It's a one-room schoolhouse built in 1874, restored and repurposed rather than replaced. The espresso machine and the Stone Creek Coffee on tap are new. The walls, the proportions, the sense that you're sitting in something that predates the roundabout by roughly 150 years, are not.
Hours run Monday through Friday from 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. It's small inside, so if you're headed there on a weekend morning after a farm visit, plan for a short wait or grab something to go.
A Brewery Wearing an Old Name
A few miles away at W148N12696 Pleasant View Drive, Old Germantown runs a farm kitchen, sausage operation, and brewery out of a working farmstead. The name isn't a marketing flourish. It's borrowed from a Milwaukee beer label that dates back more than 80 years, and the brewing equipment itself came from Titletown Brewing in Green Bay before it ever made a batch here. The current menu runs wood-fired pizza, house-made sausages, and a rotating beer list, served on a barnyard patio that hosts music through the warmer months.
The restaurant is open Thursday through Sunday, closed Monday through Wednesday, so this isn't a spot you can drop into on a random Tuesday night. If you're building a fall weekend around it, Thursday or Friday evening tends to be less of a wait than Saturday.
What both of these places share is the same quiet fact: the thing that feels like a discovery is actually a restoration. Someone found an old building, an old name, or old equipment, and put it back to work instead of building something from scratch.
Oktoberfest Returns to Dheinsville
The clearest version of that pattern shows up at the end of September, when the Germantown Historical Society holds its annual Oktoberfest at Dheinsville Historic Park on Holy Hill Road. This year it runs Saturday, September 26 through Sunday, September 27, with admission and parking free both days.
Saturday runs from noon to 11 p.m. and includes the annual Dachshund Dash at 3 p.m., alongside live German music through the evening. Sunday's stage schedule is set:
- Noon to 3 p.m.: Ryan Kautzer Band
- 3 to 3:30 p.m.: Pommersche Tanzdeel Freistadt, performing with kids and the anniversary couple
- 3:30 to 7 p.m.: Copper Box
This is the Historical Society's event, held on the Historical Society's own land, which means the festival itself is a piece of local preservation work rather than a pop-up. The park carries the Dheinsville name because preserving that history is the organization's reason for existing. An Oktoberfest with a dachshund race and a polka band isn't incidental to that mission. It's the mission, dressed up for a weekend.
The Farms Don't Run on the Same Calendar
If you're planning the next few weekends around apple picking or pumpkins, it helps to know that not every farm event runs every weekend, and the two big draws near Germantown don't overlap the way you'd expect.
| Event | Remaining 2026 dates | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Basse's Apple & Sunflower Fest | Through Labor Day today, then Sept 11-13 | Fridays 3-7 p.m., Sat/Sun 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Labor Day 10 a.m.-5 p.m. |
| Germantown Oktoberfest at Dheinsville | Sept 26-27 | Saturday noon-11 p.m., Sunday noon-7 p.m. |
Basse's Farms is a short drive out in Colgate, close enough that most Germantown residents treat it as a local fixture, and its Apple & Sunflower Fest is built around a 5-acre sunflower maze, U-pick apples across several varieties, and a beer and wine garden inside the sunflower patch itself, with wine slushies as the thing regulars specifically come back for. The fest opened back on August 29 and only runs on scattered weekends rather than straight through September. Today, Labor Day, is the last day of this stretch, and the final weekend of the season is September 11 through 13.
For pumpkins picked closer to home, The Stout Farm, also known as Jim's Pumpkin Farm, is actually inside Germantown at W204 N12079 Goldendale Rd, offering pick-your-own pumpkins, free hayrides, and farm meats. It's a smaller, quieter operation than Basse's, which makes it the better choice if you're bringing young kids or just don't want to fight festival crowds for a pumpkin.
Why This Adds Up to Something
None of these four spots opened this year. Kaffeehaus has been serving coffee out of that schoolhouse for years. Old Germantown has been pouring beer brewed on equipment that once belonged to a Green Bay brewery since April 2022. The Historical Society has been running its annual Oktoberfest at Dheinsville the whole time. The Stout Farm has been growing pumpkins the whole time.
What's actually new is attention. A schoolhouse coffee shop, a farm brewery named for an 80-year-old beer label, and a historic park hosting a dachshund race are getting talked about together this fall in a way they haven't before, and once you notice the pattern, it's hard to unsee. The town isn't manufacturing new experiences. It's finding reasons to walk back into the old ones.
That's worth knowing if you've been meaning to try one of these places and kept putting it off because it felt like just another new thing competing for a weekend. It isn't new. It's been here the whole time, waiting for a Thursday dinner reservation or a Sunday afternoon at Dheinsville.
If any of this makes you want to know more about the neighborhood you're already living in, or about how properties like these older farms and schoolhouses hold their value over time, Craig Kasten has spent years watching Washington County's history and its housing market move in the same direction. Reach out when you're ready to talk about either one.
