Kelheim - a Schneider Weisse experience

Wheat beer is one of the most popular styles of beer to come out of Germany and though there are several sub categories, such as Berliner Weisse and Gose, most people think of the hazy, wheat beers from Bavaria. Weissbier is indeed a Bavarian speciality, and it may be known both as "weizen" (German for wheat) or as "weisse" (white), since many wheat beers have a pale, almost milky complexion. When unfiltered, such beers are often prefixed by "hefe" from the German word for yeast, e.g. hefeweizen.

Erdinger is probably the best known weissbier brewery from Bavaria and Weihenstephan may brew the "gold standard" of Bavarian weissbiers but it's G. Schneider & Sohn aka Schneider Weisse, in the town of Kelheim, that is the boldest and most innovative brewery - offering a wide range of wheat beers that will surprise you and amaze you in equal measures. Kelheim is also close to Weltenburg, the topic of an earlier post, so it was high on my list of places to visit during the road trip through Germany in September 2012.

Mount Michelsberg in Kelheim, Bavaria

Kelheim
Kelheim has a population of about 15 thousand and is beautifully situated on the banks of the Danube river, between Ingolstadt and Regensburg, in Bavaria. Old town Kelheim is a very scenic place to visit, even if beer is not your fancy, with cobble stone streets, colorful, old facades and fenced in by four impressive city gates of age five hundred years or more.

If you crave great views, little will surpass the view from Mount Michelsberg west of old town. There you can also enjoy the magnificent Befreiungshall, or Hall of Liberation, which is currently under restoration. It was ordered built by King Ludwig I of Bavaria to commemorate the victories against Napoleon during the Wars of Liberation in 1813-1815.

From Kelheim you can take ferries or small cruise boats up or down the Danube river. A very popular one, which I took, goes upstream through the Danube Gorge to Kloster Weltenburg, where you can visit the abbey brewery from 1050 or just enjoy a hearty meal in the courtyard / biergarten of the abbey.

Colorful facades along Ludwigstraße in old town Kelheim.

For those with just the smallest shred of interest in beer, Kelheim is important for its central place in Bavarian weissbier traditions. It's home to the oldest exisiting weissbier brewery, Weisses Brauhaus, which is currently where G. Schneider & Sohn is brewing their famous Schneider Weisse series of wheat beers.

Getting there and staying
Though it's possible to take a ferry, from places such as Dietfurt and Riedenburg, a car is really the best way of getting to Kelheim and around in the area. The nearest train station is a good 6 km away from old town Kelheim, in Saal, which is a bit far to walk.

Old town Kelheim isn't really big, less than 500 meter times 500 meter, so instead of driving along narrow cobble stone streets I stayed at a hotel near the Donautor city gate which allowed me to park just outside old town. The hotel I stayed at, the Altstadshotel Wittelsbacher Hof on Donaustrasse 22, is a bit pricey (€69 for a single, €99 for a double room) but with a great location, excellent rooms and a very good breakfast.

The Schneider Weisse story
Located on Emil-Ott-Straße 1-5 in old town Kelheim, Weisses Brauhaus was founded as a weissbier brewery as long ago as 1609 and is still in the business, making it the oldest wheat beer brewery in Bavaria. Since 1928, the brewery and the adjoining brewery tap and biergarten has been owned and operated by the Schneider family.

Weißes Brauhaus was founded in 1607 making it the
"Älteste Weissbierbrauerei Bayerns"

For a German brewery family, Schneider is a relative newcomer. Their entry into the world of beer came with Georg Schneider (1817-1890), the royal master brewer and leaseholder of the royal Bavarian Weisses Hofbräuhaus in Munich. In 1856 he received an offer he couldn't refuse.

For centuries it had been the exclusive privilege of the Royal family of Bavaria to brew wheat beers, everyone else had to stick to the plebeian beer style of lager. But with the advent of pilsner in the 1840s, lager beer rapidly grew in popularity and wheat beers went into a steep decline. Thus, it was in 1856 that King Ludwig II of Bavaria decided to get out of the brewing business by offering the rights to brew wheat beer to a commoner, his master brewer Georg Schneider.

With the wheat beer brewing rights in his pocket, Schneider got to work saving wheat beer from total extinction. He founded Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn  together with his son Georg Schneider II (1846-1890), and bought the old Maderbräu brewery in Tal 7, Munich, in 1872. After renovations, the brewing operations were moved from the old Weisse Hofbräuhaus to Tal 7 in September 1872. That year the brewery also introduced their Schneider Weisse wheat beer, now simply known as Original.

Since then the Schneider family has kept the wheat beer torch burning and more or less single handedly kept the old style alive, while the lager craze washed across Germany and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1890, both father and sohn died, but the barely 20 year old grandson, Georg Schneider III (1870-1905), was able to take over the running of the brewery. He renovated and expanded the brewery around the turn of the century, and in 1894 he submitted the crossed wheat ears trademark to the Patent Office in Munich, making Schneider Weisse the oldest registered trademark for wheat beer.

The crossed wheat ears trademark of Schneider Weisse

Upon Georg Schneider III's untimely death in 1905, the running of the brewery was taken over by his wife, Mathilde Schneider. It was under her control that Schneider Weisse released their first strong wheat beer, the Aventinus weizen doppelbock, in 1907. She continued as the manager of the brewery until her son, Georg Schneider IV (1900-1991), had come of age in 1924. It's with him that Kelheim finally enters our story, when in 1927 he purchased the old Schramm brewery on Thalkirchner Straße in Munich and the Weisses Bräuhaus in Kelheim. The latter was renovated and put into operations in 1928.

In 1944, during World War II, the Schneider breweries in Thalkirchner Straße and Tal 7 were destroyed by allied bombs, causing the company to move all its beer production to the Kelheim brewery in 1946. In 1958, Georg Schneider V (born 1928) took over the brewery from his father. With a doctorate degree and also educated as a brewing engineer, he started expanding and renovating the Kelheim brewery. This work would continue for most of his time as managing director, and wasn't completed until 1998! Two years after that, he was succeeded by his son - the always smiling Georg Schneider VI (born 1965), who has overseen a growing popularity of Schneider Weisse with the relase of several new beers as well as an international collaboration - the Brooklyner Schneider Hopfen-Weisse made with brewmaster Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery in 2007.

Today, G. Schneider & Sohn is a successful wheat beer brewery with a modern and highly automated brewhouse and bottling plant, located in the oldest wheat beer brewery in Bavaria - the Weisses Bräuhaus in Kelheim.

Brewery tour and tasting
A few months before going, I had signed up via email for an English speaking tour of the Weisses Brauhaus, but when I arrived it turned out that most of the others on the tour were German natives so the tour guide was sorry to inform me that the tour would be held in German. Fortunately, the group was well disciplined so it was easy to hear what the guide said and even pose a few questions, in English, from time to time.

A 320 hl stainless steel brew kettle at Weisses Brauhaus

The tour started with a walk through the hop garden in the back of the brewery. Unlike many other German breweries Schneider offers aromatic and strongly hopped weissbiers, so good hops are important to them. From there we were led into the brewhouse, to behold two large 320 hl brew kettles in stainless steel. According to our guide, about 5,600 kg crushed malt goes into each kettle where it is boiled for up to three and a half hours, resulting in 32,000 liter wort.

Schneider Weisse uses top fermenting yeasts in open fermentation tanks, where each tank can take 32,000 liter wort. The fermentation starts after roughly one day. After 2-3 days a Kräusen is formed, on top of the wort, protecting it from micro organisms in the air. Some of this Kräusen, which is basically yeast cells floating to the top of the brew, is harvested and later reused to start fermentation in new batches of beer.

After seeing the brewhouse, we were led over to the bottling plant. This is a fully automated bottling plant with a capacity of 40,000 bottles per hour. The view from the second floor viewing platform was absolutely breathtaking. Along the viewing platform guests could also view some older bottling machines and even try their hands on a simple manual bottle filler. Part of the tour was actually to pour and cap my own bottle of Schneider Weisse Original, which I could then bring with me home as a souvenir!

The modern bottling line at Weisses Brauhaus in Kelheim

After the tour of the brewery, it was time to taste the beer so our group was led over to the brewery tap right next to the brewery. There we were given tasters of seven of the Schneider Weisse beers in order of growing strength, from the mild Kristall to rich Hopfen-Weisse.

All of the Scheider Weisse beers now have a unique Tap number, in addition to their old names, and these were the ones we got to taste:

- Schneider Weisse Tap 3 Mein Alkoholfreies
- Schneider Weisse Tap 2 Mein Kristall (5.3% filtered weizen)
- Schneider Weisse Tap 1 Meine Blonde Weisse (5.2% hefeweizen)
- Schneider Weisse Tap 7 Unser Original (5.4% hefeweizen)
- Schneider Weisse Tap 4 Mein Grünes (6.2% hoppy hefeweizen)
- Schneider Weisse Tap 6 Unser Aventinus (8.2% weizen bock)
- Schneider Weisse Tap 5 Meine Hopfen-Weisse (8.2% hoppy weizen bock)

Tap 5 is the same beer originally brewed in collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery's Garrett Oliver as Schneider & Brooklyner Hopfen-Weisse in 2007.

Bottles of Schneider Weisse tasted on the brewery tour.

After the end of the official program I moved out into the cozy biergarten in the back of Weisses Brauhaus, it was a bit quiet in late September (and cold after sunset!), but I found it a great place to contemplate the long history of this place and of Bavarian wheat beers in general, while indulging in a fresh Schneider Weisse Original from draft, the only beer on draft during my visit.

Next time I'd love to come back in July, to spend a long summer evening out in the biergarten.

Schneider Weisse Original, first brewed 1872
- in the biergarten at Weisses Brauhaus.

More photos from the visit to Kelheim and Weisses Brauhaus are found at Flickr.

Kloster Weltenburg on the Donau

Known as Donau, in Germanic languages, Danube is the second longest river in Europe, after Volga in Russia. From its source in Schwarzwald (the Black Forest), in south-west Germany, it winds its way eastward for 2860 kilometers before emptying out into the Black Sea. Its historical importance as a border between the Roman empire to the south and the "barbarian" nations to the north and, later, for trade and traffic is obvious from the many famous cities founded on its banks - such as Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary and Belgrade in Serbia. Along its upper reaches a number of old monasteries can be found too, including Stift Engeszell in Austria and Kloster Weltenburg in Bavaria. The latter is home to the second oldest brewery in the world, Klosterbrauerei Weltenburg, and is the topic of this post.

First view of the Weltenburg Abbey from a Donau ferry. 

Kloster Weltenburg
Located 440 km downstream from the source of Danube, near the Donaudurchbruch bei Weltenburg or Danube gorge by Weltenburg, lies the Benedictine abbey of Weltenburg. This the oldest monastery in Bavaria, founded by Irish or Scottish monks in about 620 CE. The abbey has brewed its own beer since at least 1050, which has been taken as the official foundation date for the modern brewery, making it just ten years younger than the Weihenstephan brewery in Freising and thus the second oldest brewery in Bavaria and in the world!

The simplest, most relaxing and scenic way of getting to the abbey is to park your car on the large car parking by the river in old town Kelheim and take one of the Altmühltal ferries going from Kelheim to Weltenburg, some 5 km upstream. During the summmer months (April-September) the ferries leave Kelheim every 45 minutes, between 10 am and 3:30 pm, taking 40 minutes going upstream and half that time going back down.

Weltenburg abbey - the oldest in Bavaria.

On the way to Weltenburg you get treated to some great views of old town Kelheim, the Befreiungshalle on Mount Michelsberg, riverside houses and gardens and of the narrow gorge, with its steep walls, that the ferry passes through just before the beautiful abbey comes into view on a small peninsula on the left bank of the river. The ferry landing is just under the walls of the abbey, a short walk from the main entrance. Some people also opt to walk the riverside trail from Kelheim to Weltenburg, so if you feel sporty that is also a nice way of getting there, and it adds the extra attraction of crossing the rapid river in an unmotored cable ferry - propelled forward by the force of the river water only.

Most of the buildings seen at the abbey today are from the 18th century. The baroque church was built 1716-1751 by the architect brothers Cosmas Damian Asam and Aegid Quirin Asam, who have been immortalized with their own Asam Bock beer at the abbey. Because of the turbulent times in Europe, with wars and conflicts, the abbey was surrounded by a protective stone wall along the river (the other side is protected by a hill) and a large gate at the front.

Like other abbeys in Bavaria, Weltenburg was forced to close and the monks dispelled during the secularization of Bavaria in 1803. However, fourty years later some Benedictine monks were allowed to settle here and re-found the Weltenburg abbey, which is still today operated by the Benedictine order.

The beer garden in the courtyard at Weltenburg abbey.

Today, the Weltenburg abbey provides visitors with a nice beer garden at the main square, art galleries, shops selling religious artifacts and a museum. And the abbey also offers guided tours of its old brewery.

The Klosterbrauerei
You can book a brewery tour by filling out a form on the www.stadtmaus.de website, or you can just stop by the abbey museum and sign up for the first available tour - they're usually not full anyway, but you may end up on a German speaking tour (like I did).

The brewery is located in the building on the south-west side of the central courtyard, just a few steps from the tables of the beer garden. The brewhouse is located on the first and second floor and the grist mill on the third floor, so that gravity can be used to transport the ground malt into the mash tun and from there the wort down into the brew kettle.

The building housing the Klosterbrauerei Weltenburg.

In 1973, the last brewmaster at Klosterbrauerei Weltenburg retired and the abbey brewery went into a "Personalunion" with Brauerei Bischofshof in the city of Regensburg. Personalunion means "shared staff", so in effect the abbey brewery is now operated by brewers from the Regensburg brewery and not by the monks of Weltenburg. Today all the Weltenburger Kloster beers are bottled at Brauerei Bischofshof and several are brewed there too, but the classics - such as Barock Dunkel and Asam Bock - are still brewed at Weltenburg.

The deal with Brauerei Bischofshof was not made just to take the workload off the monks at Weltenburg but also because the old abbey brewery badly needed an upgrade, which was duly done in the mid 1970s - meaning that the modern Klosterbrauerei is a fairly modern brewery. It has a capacity of 100 hl per batch and produces 400 hl per week or 2 million liter beer per year.

According to the tour guide, Klosterbrauerei Weltenburg only uses hops from the Hallertau region and local malts in their beer. The hops are added in the form of pellets, usually 20 kg per batch. When I was there, in late September, hop harvest had just ended in Hallertau and the museum at Weltenburg had been decorated with fresh, deliciously smelling hop bines along the walls and under the ceiling. I couldn't help myself but squeeze and smell a hop cone ... hmmmm, euphoric!

Mash tun at the Weltenburg abbey brewery.

Another interesting piece of information from the tour was that the Weltenburg beers are now also brewed in Brazil, a country where beer seems to grow rapidly in popularity (I ran into a group of Brazilians at Weihenstephan a week earlier).

After touring the brewhouse, we were taken up to the third floor exhibition / tasting room, with windows overlooking the courtyard and beer garden. There we were given tastings of the various Weltenburg Kloster beers while the guide described the styles.

Because Weltenburg is a working monastery it closes its gates early, at 6 pm, and the last ferry returns to Kelheim at 4:15 pm so you've basically just got time for lunch in the beer garden before leaving. But it's well worth the trip, since the food is tasty and the draft beer world class. On my visit I enjoyed a dish of wild boar in porcino mushroom sauce accompanied by Barock Dunkel from draft before ending the visit with an Asam Bock from draft in a beautiful ceramic mug.

Asam Bock on draft at the Weltenburger abbey.

More photos can be found in this Flickr set.

Weihenstephan - world's oldest brewery

During a recent road trip through Germany, I spent a few nights in the town of Freising in Bavaria, about 40 km north of Munich. The plan was to use Freising as a base for taking daytrips into Munich, it made more sense this way because most Munich hotels were fully booked due to Oktoberfest. But Freising itself also has something unique to offer: The oldest existing brewery in the world - Weihenstephan.

The modern bar in the tasting room at Weihenstephan
- the oldest existing brewery in the world.

Freising and Weihenstephan
The history of the town of Freising is intertwined with the history of the Weihenstephan brewery and predates the founding of nearby Munich by many centuries. According to the chronicles of Bishop Arbeo (723-784), Pope Gregory II had sent out the Frankish monk Corbinian, ordained a Bishop, to evangelize Bavaria. In 724 the future Saint settled on a berg (a small mountain) in what is now Freising, where there already was a shrine. Here he established a monastery and a school.

While crossing the Alps from Rome, or so the myth goes, a bear had killed Corbinian's pack horse, but Corbinian knew how to solve this problem: He made the bear carry his luggage the rest of the way to Bavaria! The saddled bear has become a popular Bavarian legend and is today displayed in the coat of arms of Freising.

When Corbinian died in 730, his brother Erembert took over the governing of the monastery and school and in 738, when Saint Boniface regulated the ecclesial structure in the Duchy of Bavaria by creating four dioceses to be governed by the archbishop of Mainz, Erembert was chosen the first Bishop of Freising. From then on Freising became an important religious center in Bavaria.

The symbol of Freising, a saddled brown bear,
this one by the Weihenstephan brewery.

In 996 Freising received city rights from Emperor Otto III of the Holy Roman Empire and a couple of decades later, in 1020, a group of Benedictine monks settled on the Weihenstephaner Berg in the south of Freising. Here they built a Benedictine monastery and started brewing beer.

In 1040 the City of Freising gave the Benedictine monastery license to brew beer for sale to the public, which is why that year has been claimed as the foundation date by the Weihenstephan brewery, making it the oldest existing brewery in the world. But only ten years older than another Bavarian brewery, Klosterbrauerei Weltenburg.

For the next hundred years Freising remained an important city in Bavaria. In 1158, after having destroyed the episcopal bridge, custom houses, mint and salt works in Freising, Duke Henry the Lion moved the custom house and erected a new bridge in the village of Munich, which he had just founded. From then on Freising started to lose its economic significance while Munich grew to become the most important city in Bavaria.

With the rise of the French republic, which by definition was against all established religions, monasteries were closed all over Europe. First in France and Belgium, but in 1803 monasteries were closed in Bavaria too. Thus, after almost 800 years the Benedictine monastery on Weihenstephaner Berg closed and its buildings were taken over by the Bavarian state.

The brewery, which had been run by the monks, now became the property of the Bavarian state but it continued to make the Weihenstephaner beers. In 1865 a technical brewing school was established at Weihenstephan and since 1923 the brewery has been known as Bayerische Staatsbrauerei Weihenstephan or Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan, operated in conjunction with the Technical University of Munich as both a state-of-the-art production facility and a centre for learning.

The Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan.

Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan
Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan is located in the buildings of the old Benedictine monastery on top of the Weihenstephaner Berg in the south of Freising. It facilitates a research laboratory for the study of yeast and other beer related topics, as well as an educational program for new brewmasters. The brewery is open for public tours and tastings, and about a dozen types of beer are brewed here.

I joined a tour in September and was guided around the brewery by future brewmaster Daniel. Each tour starts in the tasting room, watching a short movie about the history of Weihenstephan. Then the visitors put on orange vests, to make them stand out, and are then led into the brewery proper, to see the large mash tuns and brewing kettles - all fully automated and run by computers from the control room.

We were told that Weihenstephan will brew around 320,000 hectolitre (hl) of beer in 2012, which is small by international standards but still sufficient for export to many countries in Europe and America.

The large 300 hl mash tuns at Weihenstephan.

A typical batch at Weihenstephan is made from 5,000 kg malt, which is mixed with 250 hl water in the large mashing tuns to create the wort used for brewing most of their beers (though I assume the stronger bocks have a different ratio of malt and water).

Our guide informed us that Weihenstephan currently brew 13 types of beer - including both top and bottom fermented beers.

Their top fermented beers, mostly wheat beers, ferment at 20 degrees Celsius for a couple of days and is lagered for five weeks before they are ready for consumption. Their bottom fermented beers ferment at 7-8 degrees Celsius for a week and are lagered for 7-8 weeks before kegging or bottling. We were also told that the brewers reuse the yeast many times, the bottom fermenting yeast 3-4 times and the top fermenting yeast up to 20 times.

Like most German breweries, Weihenstephan prefer German or Czech noble hops - more precisely Tettnanger, Hallertau and Saaz. The hops are mainly used in the form of pellets but the brewery also uses hop extract when brewing beer. To keep the full flavor, none of their beers are pasteurized or filtered (with the exception of the Kristall which is filtered).

The last stop on the tour, before returning to the tasting room, was in the large and very modern bottling plant where a robot handled the kegging of beer and another machine bottled up to 36,000 bottles per hour. To save the environment, the brewery reuses a bottle up to 60 times before it gets recycled.

After the tour of the brewery and bottling facility we were led back to the tasting room where we were given tasters of several types of beer - from their low alcohol alternatives and weissbiers to their high gravity bocks, including the delicious Korbinian doppelbock, named after the Saint mentioned at the beginning of this blog post. It was a nice way to end a great brewery tour.

The tasting of Weihenstephaner Korbinian
- a delicious 7.4% abv doppelbock.

Weihenstephan bräustüberl and biergarten
After a visit to the brewery, I highly recommend making a stop in their biergarten - if it's a warm and sunny day - or in the cozy bräustüberl. Both are located right next to the brewery, on top of Weihenstephaner Berg, sharing a very good Bavarian kitchen and offering the freshest Weihenstephaner beer found on tap anywhere.

Bräustüberl Weihenstephan is separated into several charming beer halls and rooms. The largest room is the Stephanskeller, on the ground floor, where up to 230 guests can be seated on heavy wooden furniture under the old, vaulted brick ceiling. You can almost feel the ghosts of long gone monks pass by your table.

The food at the Bräustüberl is top notch, on my visit I enjoyed the very tasty and filling Brewmaker's Frying Pan - with medallions of pork and beef in a rich mushroom sauce. The service was fairly quick and good, despite several large groups being served at the same time. The downside is the acoustics, it can get a bit noisy when Stephanskeller fills up.

A big attraction at the Bräustüberl, if you're into beer, is the unfiltered Weihenstephan Edel-Pils which is served only at this location. And draft only. You really don't need any other reasons for a visit, this is a smooth and very tasty pilsener.

The Stephanskeller beer hall in Bräustüberl Weihenstephan.

The biergarten is located at the back of the Bräustüberl building. About 500 guests can be seated under the open sky, enjoying the view of Freising and its green surroundings while indulging in good local beer and food.

At the end of September, not many of the tables in the biergarten were taken. But the sun was out so I decided to enjoy the view and a couple of beers outside. The schänke offered hot brezn, leberkäze, chicken and other food stuffs. And, of course, several beers on draft - including:

* Weihenstephaner Original Hell (5.1%)
* Weihenstephaner Hefe Weissbier (5.4%)
* Weihenstephaner Tradition Bayrisch Dunkel (5.2%)

On bottle I could also order their two bock beers, the 7.7% abv Vitus weizenbock and the 7.4% Korbinian doppelbock. The biergarten is small by Bavarian standards but has a lovely view and is absolutely worth a visit if you should happen to be in Freising.

The 5.1% Weihenstephaner Edel-Pils Unfiltriert
- only sold at Bräustüberl Weihenstephan

More photos from the Weihenstephan visit can be found at Flickr.

Munich Oktoberfest 2012

For a number of years I've thought about visiting the famous Oktoberfest in Munich, the world's largest beer festival. This year I finally got the chance as I had already planned a road trip through Germany in the right time period, but before delving into my own impressions of the 2012 festival I'll say a few words about its history and current status.

Welcome to the Oktoberfest 2012.

The Oktoberfest history
The origins of the Oktoberfest goes back to October 12th, 1810, when Crown Prince Ludwig - the future king Ludwig I of Bavaria - married his beloved Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. At this time, the state of Bavaria had existed for only four years so the people in Munich were jubilant and proud to celebrate the marriage of their own future king and queen. And celebrate they did!

The wedding celebrations lasted five days and took place on the meadows in front of the city gates, where people could watch horse races while indulging in beer and food. The horse races and celebrations proved so popular that they were repeated at the same place the next year, giving rise to the tradition of the Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest has been held almost every year since 1810, it has only been canceled 24 times - because of either Cholera outbreaks (in 1854 and 1873) or war (the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars).

While the original Oktoberfest started out as a relatively short and small, local festival, for and by the citizens of Munich, it has now expanded into a 16 days long beer and food extravaganza, with more than 6 million visitors annually - from all over the world. It has become the biggest tourist attraction in Munich, bringing in close to half a billion euro to the city's coffers every year.

The Ochsenbraterei tent, famous for its grilled oxen.
- Sponsored by one of the Big Six.

Despite all the tourists and the cheap souvenir stands, the festival is still very much a Munich festival - rooted in the local beer and food culture. The big tents are all sponsored by the original "Big Six" Munich breweries; Augustiner-Bräu, Hofbräuhaus, Löwenbräu, Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner and Spaten. Late arrivals, such as the world famous Schneider Weisse brewery - established in 1872, are not found on the Oktoberfest bill.

Today the meadow where the Oktoberfest is still held lies safely within the city of Munich, just a kilometer south west of the Hauptbahnhof main railway station, and it has been named after Ludwig's young bride: Theresienwiese or Theresa's meadow, often just called the Wiesn.

For the 2012 Oktoberfest, which started September 22 and ended October 7, there were 14 large tents and a number of smaller with a total seating capacity of about 100,000. The larger tents can typically seat from 5,000 to 8,000 guests and they usually feature an oompa ensemble, playing traditional Bavarian drinking songs. The smaller tents are more focused on either entertainment or speciality food, such as the famous Fischer-Vroni tent which has been selling all kinds of grilled fish (and more recently sushi) since opening up in 1948.

The how and when
Despite being a big city of 1.4 million, the massive influx of visitors to the Oktoberfest - in the millions - means that the Munich hotels will get swamped and turn up their prices. Many of the hotels will be fully booked long before the festival starts, so even if you're willing to spend big bucks for a room in central Munich you may not be able to find any.

It's both cheaper and easier to find vacant rooms outside the city, and transport is not a big problem since the metropolitan area has a very efficient railway system which can take you from the outlying districts to the heart of Munich in less than 45 minutes.

Because of this, and for reasons which will become apparent in a future post, I decided to stay in Freising, a town some 40 km north east of Munich, not far from the international airport. From Freising you can take the fast commuter train, which departs a couple of times every hour and run all day long. This train takes less than 30 minutes to München Hauptbahnhof, in the heart of the city, which is just a short walk from the Theresienwiese or from Marienplatz for that matter.

Ein, swei, drei - prost!
At a quarter to 10 on a sunny Monday morning in September I went in through the main gate at the Wiesn, ready for my first Oktoberfest. Many other visitors had already arrived and were walking around between the tents, taking photographs or just enjoying the fine weather while waiting for the festival tents to open.

A long queue of several hundred kurt lederhosen clad men had already formed in front of the Hacker-Pschorr tent, but that was fine by me as I had no intention of going in there.

Augustiner Festhalle with an oompa band on stage.

My tent of choice was Augustiner Festhalle, sponsored by the oldest brewery in Munich,  Augustiner-Bräu. This brewery has made beer in Munich since 1328!

Not only is Augustiner-Bräu the oldest brewery in Munich, but they make the beer that many locals claim to be the best - the Augustiner Edelstoff Helles. And, finally, the Augustiner Festhalle is the only tent at Oktoberfest where the beer is served like in the old days, straight from large, 200 liter woodens casks, only assisted by gravity. Thus, for me the choice was rather simple.

Inside the Augustiner Festhalle there was still plenty of space at 10 am, roughly half the tables were free while the other half were reserved. It turned out that most of the free tables had been taken by the time I noticed them, but since many of the reserved tables were reserved from 4 or 5 pm, probably for groups of people coming straight from work, I sat down by a table that was free for the next seven hours. That was plenty of time to enjoy the beer, food and atmosphere in this tent.

As I'd never been to Oktoberfest before I was uncertain about how to order beer and first tried asking a man standing by the large wooden cask in one of the four schänkes (a schänke is basically a filling station for beer), but he pointed at the girls running around with large beer mugs so I sat down again and finally managed to attract the attention of one service lady. Two minutes later she was back with a Maß - a 1 liter beer mug - of the 5.6% strong Augustiner Edelstoff Helles.

I had worried it would be tough to empty the large mugs of beer, before the beer went flat, but it turned out to be no problem at all. The Edelstoff is such a tasty, refreshing and drinkable beer that before I knew it I was looking down into the wide glass at a small puddle of golden liquid far down there at the bottom.

Drinking large volumes of beer was also helped / promoted by the many girls walking down the aisles in the tent, offering freshly baked, warm and salty brezn from big baskets. Brezn is better known as brezel in the rest of Germany or pretzel in the US. This salty delicacy is a match made in heaven with German helles beer, take my word for it.

Schänke number 2 (out of 4) in the Augustiner Festhalle
- serving Edelstoff Helles straight from the cask.

The first couple of hours, the large tent remained fairly quiet and relaxing, but around noon just about all the seating space had been occupied and I noticed people standing along the sides, waiting for someone to leave or for their reservation to kick in. It was getting harder to move around, both for the beer mug carrying girls and for those guests needing to go to the toilets, as a large number of standing guests blocked the aisles.

Around noon the stakes were raised when an oompa band entered the raised stage in the middle of the tent and launched into a series of drinking songs of which I just caught the omnious "ein, zwei, drei - prost!" upon which the band leader raised his own Maß and toasted together with the audience before swallowing a good mouthfull.

It was about this time that I realized it was time to move on if I wanted to see some of the other tents, as the Augustiner Festhalle was now approaching a very packed condition. So after two nice hours and three Maß of Edelstoff I left the tent to take a look outside the tent.

The horse drawn Augustiner-Bräu Faßwagen from 1901
- still used for transporting wooden beer kegs.

Outside things had become a lot more chaotic than when I arrived, it seemed that several tents were so full that bouncers had been posted to stop more guests from entering - so instead people roamed around between bratwürst stalls and the smaller tents.

When I looked up towards the main gate I saw a continous stream of people entering, so it was obvious it would just get more cramped at the Oktoberfest. Thus, after pushing my way through the crowds for a few minutes and taking photographs of the Augustiner-Bräu Faßwagen, a beautiful horse drawn wagon from 1901 which came with more wooden beer casks for the Augustiner Festhalle, I extricated myself from the crowd and left the Wiesn for a quiet biergarten in Munich.

Concluding remarks
The Oktoberfest is a strange mixture of circus, carnival and Bavarian holiday, you'll see all kinds of people from all walks of life. The party factor is high and probably grows as day turns into night, so if you're up for that and a bit cramped space the Oktoberfest should be rigth up your alley.

As for myself, it was worth making the effort and I did enjoy the short spell in Augustiner Festhalle before it started getting rowdy in there. This was a once in a lifetime event for me, I will certainly return to the lovely biergartens and cozy bierstüberls of Munich, but not during Oktoberfest.

A Maß of Augustiner-Bräu Edelstoff Helles
- my best memory from Oktoberfest.

More photos from the 2012 Oktoberfest can be found in this Flickr set.