O’zapft is!

You know how it works around here. We like beer, and we like festivals: so beer festivals would seem like an obvious thing. I've written about some of my favourites in various Simian Substitute posts over the years, as well as that odd pandemic-era arrangement when we had a few of them held online. However, this year has been a bad one for them. The Great British Beer Festival took a year off in 2024 while all the building works in Olympia are being completed (and it's avoiding London altogether in 2025). Meanwhile, BrewDog's annual Collabfest has possibly finished for good, as it turned out to be uneconomic to ship 100 beers around every bar in the country.

But there's one beer festival we hadn't got around to trying yet: possibly the ultimate beer festival in the world. So a couple of months ago, we went to Munich to see what the first three days of Oktoberfest are like.

Saturday 21st September

We're meeting up with the BBG's old mate Miki, who's lived in Munich for the past decade, and she immediately comes good by finding us the perfect spot to watch the opening parade. It probably helps at this point to talk a little bit about the logistics. Oktoberfest takes place in a massive area in the centre of Munich known as the Wiesn (full name Theresienwiese): for a couple of weeks every autumn it turns into a self-contained town centered around beer tents serving industrial quantities of beer. On the first day, they open the Wiesn at 9:00 AM: we're keeping away from that, because we've seen a terrifying video showing people queuing outside for several hours, and charging as soon as the barriers go up to get a spot inside the beer tents. Bear in mind that once they've done that, they'll have to sit around inside the tents for three hours before any beer goes on sale: because it's preceded by the parade of the Oktoberfest landlords and breweries, in which the six main brewers, accompanied by several marching bands, walk through the centre of town to the Wiesn itself. At the end of all this, the Mayor opens up the first barrel of beer, proclaims 'O'zapft is!' (‘it’s tapped!’), and only then can the drinking begin.

The parade, on the whole, seems a lot more achievable than the opening ceremony. Thankfully Miki has done her research, and cunningly takes us down Josephspitalstraße where the parade participants are gathering, all the way up to the junction with Sonnenstraße where the parade starts. We get a decent view of everyone who's there: on the downside, we also get far too close to the massive quantities of horse shit cascading down the streets, because the key participants in the parade are several horse-drawn carriages carrying the barrels of beer to be served at the festival. Thanks to our spot at the front, we get to see all of this without any real obstructions, all the way up to the very back of the parade: a police escort followed by several large orange vehicles hosing down the road, to clear up after the horses and indirectly spray the crowds with shitty water.

After a detour that takes in lunch at the Oktoberfest museum, and the discovery in a nearby shop that Dieter Meier of Yello now makes chocolate, we head towards the Wiesn for our first visit to the main event. And it’s rammed – we’ll subsequently find that the number of people passing through the gates on this first day hit the half a million mark. People assume it’s just a big beer festival, but there’s so much more than that: there’s a massive funfair, plenty of food stalls, and all manner of souvenir stalls offering to sell you ridiculous hats. But at the centre of it all are the massive beer halls run by the six breweries. There’s no chance of getting a seat inside one today – all the tables have been pre-booked, under the glorious arrangement that each person at the table has to buy a minimum of two beers and half a chicken. We wander inside one of the tents for a peek, and it looks like the last days of Sodom in pub form. You can’t actually see the tables, because everyone appears to be standing on them whilst brandishing litre glasses of beer and either yelling or singing. Despite all this, in the three days we’re there I only ever see one person being sick, and by the time I notice him it’s coming up clear so it probably wasn’t too bad.

Thankfully there’s also a walk-in arrangement, as each beer tent has an associated beer garden, although those all have fairly hefty queues to get in. We get our first beer in at the Hofbrau garden, and it should be pointed out that at this stage I’m really not having that good a time. The crowds are much huger than expected, and there are lots of people bumping into you every minute or two: and as I’m still twitchy from an incident on the airport bus the night before where some git dropped a hard suitcase from a great height onto my hand, every invasion of my personal space feels a little more personal. Plus, there are no seats, so we’re standing around a tiny portion of someone else’s table. The noise is terrific and I can barely hear what anyone’s saying. And to cap it all, this particular beer garden only serves beer in half litre measures, so you don’t even get the pleasure of the mahoosive litre glasses (Maß) that everyone associates with the event.

It does get better, though, although it takes a little time. Our second beer garden of the day – attached to the Schottenhamel Festhalle – is a bit more organised and has a one-in-one-out door policy. In the 45 minutes or so we’re queueing, I feel I must have heard the German for ‘don’t you know who I am?’ several times: but at the end of it all we get a table, and the opportunity to order a Maß each. Once you’re sat down with one of those things in an open air environment, with people all round you happily doing the same, you get to see the point of it all. Granted, a little too much of our afternoon is spent trying to find the toilets, but on the whole it’s a good day. We make a note of the most interesting food stalls for future reference, but have dinner at a brewpub in the centre of town instead.

Sunday 22nd September

Another day, another parade. Saturday’s parade was just a dinky little affair with a thousand or so people on it: but day two of Oktoberfest sees the Costume and Rifleman Parade, with typically has an attendance of ten thousand. This time round, we’re sitting down – at a few places along the route, they’ve erected bleachers with seats you can purchase through Munich Ticket (though in a quaint old-fashioned touch, the tickets are actual cardboard things you have to pick up from the Deutsche Theater). It’s a good job that we’re sitting, because the theoretical two-hour parade ends up running for nearly four hours, with dozens of marching bands interwoven with people in traditional costume. Some tour groups in our bleachers are obviously running to a strict timetable and leave early, but we stick it out all the way to the by-now-traditional shit washing trucks.

Our viewing spot is just a couple of minutes away from the Wiesn, so at the end of the parade we head over there just in time for lunch. This is the point where we discover that making notes of interesting food stalls is no use if you can’t actually remember where they are in this vast area. My advice is if you find somewhere that you like the look of and you want to find it again, take lots of photos or GPS co-ordinates. We’re reduced to walking up and down the many connecting paths until we find the grilled fish place that The BBG noticed on Saturday – and, to be fair, it’s worth the wait.

In terms of crowds, it’s still busy, but Sunday is a bit less manic than Saturday. You can tell this because our choice of beer garden for the day – the Marstall – only has a queue for a couple of minutes, and we’re shown straight to a table that we end up sharing with a chatty German bloke, a couple from Canada (who look totally freaked out when I mention that it’s quiet compared with yesterday) and a group of what look like City lads who, as we leave, have just started passing around some mysterious white powder that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t pass this nation’s purity laws.

Mind you, those purity laws are the reason why when we leave the Wiesn for the day, our first stop is a (somewhat less traditional) bar. I mentioned The Keg Bar in passing in a previous article, but couldn’t remember much about it – but as soon as we descended the stairs it became totally familiar. I think last time we went there was a late night, because in the late afternoon it’s much more of a sports bar: screens on every wall, mostly showing American football, but with one allowing The BBG the opportunity to see her beloved Gooners losing their lead over Man City in literally the 98th minute of play. Thankfully, they’ve also got some interesting craft beers that deviate from the admittedly fine tradition employed by the Oktoberfest brewers. We wrap it all up with dinner at the Seehaus restaurant at the opposite end of the Englischen Garden from Keg Bar, meaning we have to walk for 30 minutes in a pitch-black forest before we can get fed.

Monday 23rd September

No Miki today: she’s back at work. And that goes for most of the crowds at the Wiesn: the only people here during the day are basically tourists and alcoholics. So for me, day three is better than day two, which was better than day one. I’d rather that than the other way round, I guess. And it helps consolidate a theory that The BBG and I have gradually formulated in our years of travelling together, which is this: whenever you go to a new place, you only get to properly know your way around its ins and outs on your final day. As an example, remember our lengthy search for toilets on Saturday? Today I finally notice a detail on the Cupid statues dotted around the area: if you look around the back of them, the Cupids are all sitting on gold chamberpots. That’s when you discover that they’re all aiming their arrows at the nearest bog.

Today is also the day that we finally get into a beer tent rather than a beer garden: and it’s Augustiner, probably the most traditional and independent of the breweries represented here. We still haven’t reserved a table, but we don’t need to: close examination of the reservation signs on the tables show that most of them are booked up from 5pm onwards, so as long as our lunch doesn’t go on for too long we can grab one of them till then. And because we didn’t have to reserve, we’re not forced into two beers and half a chicken each, which would have disappointed The BBG a tad. Instead, we each make do with one beer and a pretzel the size of my head, and that works out just fine for a lunch.

Finally, this is where I get the Oktoberfest experience I was looking for (and, as you can see, took a video of). A reasonably full beer hall, buzzy but not raucous, aided by an oompah band in the centre of the room playing traditional tunes. They stop every so often to play Ein Prosit, the sorta theme tune of the festival, which tends to act as a bumper before the band goes off for a collective wee. The table service is terrific, with beer and pretzels getting to us in record time. (If we were interested in chicken, that would have been the same – we end up at a table just across from the kitchen, where we can see chickens in their hundreds being roasted and served up.) As it’s a tourist-heavy crowd, we get accosted by a waitress who offers to take an official souvenir photo of us for thirteen euros, and then keeps the change from fifteen as a tip before I can say anything about it. Still, it’s a nice photo.

We round off our long weekend with a quick visit to the funfair side of things. The 12D cinema appears to be one of those rides where they shake you about while watching a film and hurling all sorts of liquids and gases in your face, so we say no to that and go on the big wheel instead. It gives us a bird’s eye view of just how massive an event this is, which we’d already worked out at ground level, but it’s nice to get confirmation. (See top of page.)

Despite my misgivings on day one, I had a great time at my first Oktoberfest. If I had to do it again, I’d still like to do the opening weekend – those two parades are glorious – but I’d either give the first day at the Wiesn itself a miss, or go along just to look and not expect to take part in anything. Go there on a weekday, and you’ll get the full experience without the number of people bumping into you getting on your nerves. Maybe if I go again, I might buy one of those hats that looks like a roast chicken.