Another Year, Another Oktoberfest Begins
I am on my way to my 22nd in a row (minus the two COVID years) , but how much longer can ‘we’ keep doing this?
It began on the 21st of September at noon. The Munich mayor, Dieter Reiter, pounded a tap into the wooden barrel containing 90 liters of perfectly-chilled “Wies’n” beer, a slightly heavier lager beer brewed just for the three-week festival by the six participating breweries, and shouted the long-awaited, “o’zapft is’ (it’s tapped).”
From the moment, beers began pouring in the 14 festival tents, the average size coming in at around 5000 souls, and within two and a half hours, the first “victim” was unconscious and being raced off to the first aid tent. The 24-year-old American woman was passed out with alcohol poisoning. 659 others would join her that day in the tent, some in the hospitals where IVs are administered, and the revelers are brought back to “life.”
I have been to 23 Oktoberfests, my first being in 1999 when I was creating our beer brand in Russia and preparing to brew Munich’s Lowenbrau beer in St. Petersburg, and that year, I ended up — somehow — in my room, on my bed, naked. My clothes were in a pile on the floor. I recall not knowing where my hotel was, but the kind taxi driver — who I today call “Jesus” because I think the son…
