Oktoberfest. The mere word evokes thoughts of full steins, sausages, pretzels, colorful tents, and busty dirndl-wearing women delivering tasty suds by the metric ton.
For the most part, cool, I’m with you. However, the perennial favorite story of the first Oktoberfest and beer is very much romanticized, misrepresented, and in need of a level of clarification that I wish was wasn’t the case considering the modern evolution of beer culture.
Let me explain by telling you the tale of the original Oktoberfest. In 1810, on October 12, the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig was to be married, and he invited the public to share the day with him—food, drink, and merriment regaling the hills with splendor for all. It was so well received that they decided to do it every year, and thus, Oktoberfest was born!
Cool story, bro. However, Oktoberfest was already happening before this occasion. See, the Germans love their beer (that’s no secret), but they love it to the point that when it turns out bad, they dump it, and they were dumping out a lot of it in the summer because it was sour and foul tasting. Now, there’s a huge difference in the sourness of a beer infected with wild yeast and something like a Berliner Weiss, which is intentionally soured with the same bacteria that makes yogurt tart. Beer that is infected with wild yeast tastes horrible, because the wild yeast produces terrible off flavors that their lack of pedigree ensures won’t clean up afterward.
What the Germans were finding was that their beer in the warm months was getting infected and becoming nigh-unto-undrinkable, so they eliminated the variables that they could control and understand. They knew that if they brewed beer in cooler months, it tasted clean and pleasing. So, they divided their brewing schedules around the cold months and stored beer in caves, sometimes packed with ice from previous years, to keep it cold. Originally, the beer was “brewed” (a misnomer I’ll explain sometime, but it’s so prevalent in our lexicon of beer terms that it’s acceptable) in the fall, to be dispensed starting in March, hence Märzen-Oktoberfestbier. It was consumed all through the summer, and in the fall it had to be disposed of somehow, mostly by drinking, because they had to empty, clean, and fill their tanks with new, fresh beer. So the brewers got together in September and had a party amongst themselves.
The brewers’ party predated the 1810 soirée. The first festival held by Prince Ludwig, years later, was in October, after all. His affair, originally called Theresienwiese (Theresa’s meadow), in honor of his wife, instead featured food, some beer, horse racing, and card games. Hardly the beerfest painted by the brush of nostalgia. Instead, it was considered a fun time, but kind of boring by the common person’s standard.
A few years and not enough beers later, the Prince was holding his yearly party to a bigger and bigger reception, but he noticed the rise in beer consumption at his festival and was told of the brewers’ Oktoberfest being held weeks before. Theirs was a drinking party that started in late September and ended on October 1. Inquires were made, deals were struck, and in 1814, more beer became available in a manner that benefitted both the brewers and the festival. The festival began earlier than previously arranged in order to comply with the brewers’ schedule. In fact, it wasn’t until 1896 that beer tents were even a thing at this event! By that time, horse racing was diminished, card games all but eliminated, and even the knitting circles from the original party disappeared.
This was around the time that they started toying with the brewing schedule to include less hops than before (hops “drop out” or become less noticeable over time than when the beer is first tapped, letting the malty character of the beer come forward, good for the long-term storage practices of the years before) and brewing in March, storing over the summer and dispensing at the yearly Oktoberfest. You can thank Spaten for a lot of that, as well as for popularizing a style we can enjoy year-round now.
Over the past few decades, the official beer of Oktoberfest has seen a gradual dumbing down in my eyes, as rich, bready, and malty Munich and Vienna malts are eschewed for paler, almost tomato-vine-green flavored malts because apparently, it’s a general view in Europe that Americans only like pale beer. Basically, we hate flavor. Guh. I’ll take a nice, rich, malty, amber red-hued Märzen-Oktoberfestbier over that any day. Not to say that pale Oktoberfest beers are bad; they’re just not what I want when the redolent smells of fall come around.
So, cool story or historical perspective aside, I think we can all agree that hopefully we feel a little chill in the air, because Oktoberfest season is coming and with it the phrase “Life is good.”