The 191st Oktoberfest opens on the Theresienwiese in Munich on Saturday 19 September, and the more than 6.5 million visitors expected across the following sixteen days will pay an average of €15.61 for a one litre Maß of beer. The figure comes from the price list published by the City of Munich and represents a rise of 2.38 per cent on last year's festival.
Prices across the tents run from €14.80 to €15.90. Augustiner-Festhalle carries the lowest listed price among the large tents at €14.90, while Armbrustschützen-Festzelt, Bräurosl and Löwenbräu-Festzelt are among those charging the top rate. Only beer brewed inside Munich's city limits by the six traditional breweries, Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner and Spaten, may be sold as Oktoberfest beer, a protection upheld by a Munich regional court ruling in 1990. The festival runs until 4 October across 17 large tents and 21 smaller ones, and entry to the grounds themselves is free.
The opening follows a script that has barely changed in a century. At noon on Saturday the Mayor of Munich, Dominik Krause, taps the first barrel in the Schottenhamel tent and declares "O'zapft is!", Bavarian for "it's tapped", and nothing is poured anywhere on the grounds until he has. A costume and riflemen's parade follows on the Sunday with around 9,000 participants, decorated carriages and marching bands. One new wrinkle this year is that the site will double as a film set, with scenes for a Netflix romantic comedy due to be shot during the festival after producers advertised for roughly 4,000 extras.
For British visitors, though, the number that matters is not the price. It is the measure. Festbier served at Oktoberfest is typically brewed between 5.8 and 6.3 per cent, and a single litre at six per cent works out at around six UK units, close to half the 14 units a week the NHS advises adults not to exceed on a regular basis. A pint of four per cent lager in a British pub comes in at about 2.3 units. The stein is not simply a larger glass of the same drink, and that arithmetic is a great deal more useful done before a trip than after one.
Oktoberfest began, improbably enough, as a wedding reception. In October 1810 Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate on the fields outside the city gates. Those fields have been called the Theresienwiese, Therese's meadow, ever since, and the horse races staged that year turned into an annual fixture that grew into the largest folk festival in the world. Full details of this year's programme are on the official festival site.
Beer is only half the story of how the Alps drink now. The Hugo, the elderflower and prosecco spritz that spread across British summer drinking this year, was created in 2005 by a bartender named Roland Gruber at a bar in Naturns in South Tyrol, a couple of hundred miles south of Munich. Gruber wanted something to offer as an alternative to the Spritz Veneziano and reached first for lemon balm syrup, settling on elderflower mainly because it was easier to get hold of. Two decades later it is a fixture on Alpine and southern German drinks lists. It is worth being straight about the pecking order, mind. The Aperol Spritz remains far and away the bigger name of the two, and for a lot of drinkers the bitter orange serve is still the default. The Hugo's appeal is that it is softer and more floral, not that it has displaced anything.
David Baddeley, who founded Boozy in Greater Manchester, said: "Every country has its own idea of what a normal measure looks like, and that is what catches people out when they travel. A litre of festival beer is not a pint, and nobody hands you a conversion chart at the tent door. We print the strength and the volume on the front of every can for exactly that reason. People should be able to work out what they are drinking without having to go looking for it."
Boozy cans its own version of the Alpine serve as Elderflower Breeze at 8.4 per cent in a 200ml can, which works out at 1.68 units, and the full Hugo Spritz recipe for building one from scratch sits alongside around forty other classics on the site. Anyone who wants to check the strength of a serve before pouring it can run the numbers through the Cocktail ABV Calculator, which now covers more than 100 recipes.
Oktoberfest runs from 19 September to 4 October. Advice on units, on drinking while abroad and on keeping track of your own intake is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
