Unsere Geschichte
Three generations. One recipe book.
Old Heidelberg Deli opened on Las Olas Boulevard in the spring of 1968, in a 600-square-foot storefront with one display case and a smokehouse out back.
Hans Brunner, fresh off the boat from Heidelberg with a Meisterbrief from the Handwerkskammer, hung his sign and started making the sausages he'd grown up with — bratwurst, weisswurst, leberwurst — for a small but fiercely loyal community of German expats.
Three generations later, the storefront is bigger, the smokehouse is stainless steel, and the customer book runs to thousands. But the recipes are the same. The standards are the same. And every single wurst is still stuffed by hand, in our shop, the same way Hans did it in 1968.
The Craft
Slow smoke. Real casings. Time.
Industrial sausage takes hours. Ours takes days. We cold-smoke over beechwood, then hang to cure in our own smokehouse — the only way to develop the deep colour, the snap, and the aroma that defines a proper German wurst.
We use natural casings from sustainable suppliers. We grind our own meat, daily. We blend our spices in-house from a recipe book Hans wrote in pencil, in 1962.
A timeline.
Hans Brunner opens the original Old Heidelberg storefront on Las Olas with one display case and a hand-built smokehouse.
Hans's son Klaus joins the shop after completing his butcher's apprenticeship in Stuttgart. He brings the bauernschinken recipe.
We expand into the neighbouring storefront, doubling the deli case and adding the imported-grocery section.
Anna Brunner takes over the smokehouse — a third generation at the bench. The Black Forest ham program begins.
Still on Las Olas. Still hand-stuffing every wurst. Still running on the same recipe book.
Willkommen.
Come see for yourself.
We're open six days a week. The coffee is on, and there's usually a slice of leberkäse waiting for you to try.