The Real Oktoberfest Beer

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Picture Oktoberfest. Crowds of happy people? Check. Oompah bands? Everywhere, though these days they mostly play pop songs. Plates of meaty goodies? Yep, not a leafy vegetable in sight. Lots of big mugs of beer? You bet, but it may not be the beer you think.

Munich’s Oktoberfest dates back to 1810, when a wedding celebration for Bavaria’s crown prince took place in town. Citizens enjoyed it so much that they wanted to do it again, and being Germans, they set up a bureaucracy in 1819 to make it happen. Despite wars, famine, and disease outbreaks, they’ve failed to put on only 24 Oktoberfests since then.

Today, Oktoberfest is still held in the same spot as the original: the Theresienwiese, a large open field in the middle of Munich, also affectionately called the Wies’n (VEE-zun), or the meadow. There are 16 days of festivities, the last of which is always the first Sunday of October. (Yes, most of Oktoberfest actually takes place in September, when the weather is better.) It draws more than 6 million people from around the world for food, amusement park rides, music, dancing, and enough beer to float a small battleship—literally.

It’s not just any beer, though. By the rules of Oktoberfest, beer served in the tents (as the big, gaily decorated temporary beer halls are called) must come from one of the six Munich breweries—Paulaner, Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Spaten, Löwenbräu, and Hofbräu—and conform to rules about alcohol level and body. The brew is specially made for the festival and is called, appropriately enough, festbier.

The global reputation of Oktoberfest, along with terrific flavor and easily quaffable character, has earned festbier a place in American drinkers’ hearts. Oktoberfest beers—both those exported from Munich and those brewed in the United States—are the bestselling seasonal beers in the U.S., retailers and wholesalers have long told me.

The catch: The Oktoberfest beer we drink in the U.S. is not the same type of beer served at Oktoberfest. We get a rich-looking amber lager with a medium body and a wonderful, juicy malt character, hopped just enough to keep it balanced. But the beer served on the Wies’n is blond. Delicious, malty, and so damned drinkable it seems to evaporate out of your liter mug…but blond.

“The beers in the tents have always been blond,” says Jeff Coleman, head of Colorado-based beer importer Distinguished Brands International. Maybe not always—old color photos of Oktoberfest clearly show an amber brew being served—but Coleman has been going to Oktoberfest for about 20 years and used to be the U.S. importer for Paulaner. The beers have been blond for a while.

Oddly enough, in the U.S., a country obsessed with yellow beer, the Weis’n blond doesn’t fly. Coleman recalls that Paulaner shipped the blond festbier instead of its usual amber export one year in the early 1990s. “We couldn’t give it away,” he says. “The American perception was that this wasn’t Oktoberfest beer.”

These American notions may come from experiences over there enjoying Oktoberfest in the 1970s. They may also be influenced by the writing of the late beer connoisseur Michael Jackson, who was always a strong supporter of the amber, first developed in the 1870s by brewing giant Gabriel Sedlmayer, owner of the Spaten Brewery in Munich.

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