The Beer Festival of Oktoberfest
The Oktoberfest is the largest
beef festival in the world, attracting up to six million visitors
annually to the beer gardens of Munich, Germany every September-October.
A truly riotous festival with crowds that rival those of Carnival in Rio,
this event has inspired many celebrations around the world, but there is
only one true Oktoberfest!
The first Oktoberfest took
place on 12 October 1810, in celebration of the marriage of Prince Ludwig
of Bavaria to Princess Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen. All of the
citizens of Munich were invited to a meadow in front of the city tower,
to raise a glass or two in honor of the union, and this became an annual
tradition. In the early years horse races were held in the local fields,
but as the festival grew, the focus began to change. In 1896, businessmen
working with the Munich breweries built the first giant beer tents for
the Oktoberfest and drinking has been the primary objective of the
festivities ever since.
Nowadays, enormous tents are
filled with teeming throngs of locals and visitors from all around the
world, and traditional musicians lead the crowds in well-known drinking
chants. The extra-strong Oktoberfest beer (or wiesn) is brewed by a
handful of local breweries, and is served in traditional one-liter (2.1
pint) mugs called mass. As well as drinking roughly six million glasses
of wiesn, the crowd gets through some 91 oxen, 383,000 sausages and
630,000 chickens as well as tonnes of local favorites such as cheese
noodles and sauerkraut. There is no better city to host this
alcohol-filled extravaganza than fun-loving Munich.
