Everything Traditional About Oktoberfest Is Younger Than the Tent
In 1898 five men bid for five neighbouring stalls at the Oktoberfest auction, by the trade paper’s account as strawmen for the Münchner Kindl brewery. The stalls went to Georg Lang, a publican from Nuremberg, who joined them into a hall for six thousand drinkers. The other restaurateurs later sued the city over it, and lost. The giant tent is now the thing people picture when they picture Oktoberfest.
The story of how he did it is a story about who controls the Wiesn.
The companion piece of 18 September argued that the beer in the tents is not the beer the festival started with: Munich lightened its amber Märzen into the pale Festbier it pours in nearly every tent today, over about forty years and with one tent still pouring the old beer from the wood, while America kept the amber. This piece is about the tent and the halls.
The archive work behind this piece is Andreas Krennmair’s, who reconstructed the whole affair issue by issue from the Bayerische Gastwirts-Zeitung of 1898 on his blog Daft Eejit Brewing. We have followed his citations to the digitised originals (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, volume 19, 1898) and added the argument; the digging is his.
What the Wiesn looked like before
The beer stalls stood in the Wirtsbudenring, the ring of wooden booths that followed an 1825 municipal decree limiting Munich’s beer vendors to 18, as oktoberfest.de tells it. They were kept small: the Bayerische Gastwirths-Zeitung recorded, Krennmair found, the maximum permitted dimensions for 1888 as 4.4 metres tall, 7.3 metres wide, 10 metres long. From 1895 the big breweries also began putting up temporary halls for about 1,500.
The beer was not standardised either. In 1895 and 1896, by Krennmair’s list from the trade paper, the Wiesn poured Vienna lager from Dreher of Kleinschwechat, Bohemian beer from the Bürgerliches Brauhaus in Budweis, Kulmbacher Export from Franconia, Pilsner from Thomasbräu and wheat beer from G. Schneider & Sohn, poured at the festival’s first dedicated Weißbier stall, which opened in 1895 under the restaurateur Fritz Reiss. Austrian, Czech and Franconian beer, at the Oktoberfest.
The auction, and the five strawmen
Munich auctioned its Oktoberfest stalls every August. On 10 August 1898 the auction was held at Circus Bavaria, and the winners were published in the trade paper four days later, as Krennmair found: three stalls to Löwenbräu, two each to Augustiner, Pschorrbräu, Spatenbräu, Hackerbräu and Bürgerliches Bräuhaus, one each to a scattering of others, and five to the Münchner Kindl brewery.
By 28 August, five restaurateurs had applied to combine their stalls so they could serve the same beer together. The magistrate said no.
A promise nobody remembers making
They came back with a complaint. They would suffer financial damage, they said, if forced to run five stalls separately, and besides, the administrative counsellor Nagler had promised them a permit, which was why they had bid at all. Nagler denied promising anything. He also said that none of the other restaurateurs had wanted those stalls at auction, and that the complaints only started once word spread that the five were strawmen for the brewery, and that the whole operation would be handed to somebody else entirely.
That somebody was Georg Lang (1866–1904), licensee of the Krokodil in Nuremberg. Counsellor Heindl pointed out that merging the stalls broke the terms of the auction. Nagler added that had he known a “stranger” from Nuremberg was involved, he would have opposed it from the start, since the rules required a local trading licence and Lang had none. Counsellor Hübler asked why Dreher had a stall, then. Because Dreher owned a Munich beer hall, came the answer, and it was the tenant, not the brewery, who would run it.
The committee granted them a permit for two large stalls separated by a passageway. One vote against, from Heindl.
Six thousand seats and fifty thousand songbooks
Lang’s own advertisement ran on 25 September in the Gastwirts-Zeitung. His 1. Bayerische Riesenhalle (the first Bavarian giant hall) would hold 6,000 guests, served by 120 staff, entertained by his own 30-piece house band, with 50,000 songbooks printed and handed out free to the guests. It covered stalls 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26: precisely the five won by Münchner Kindl’s nominal bidders, two of whom the advertisement itself names: Andreas Hub at stall 24 and Franz Kleber at stall 25. The beer was Märzenbier, brewed specially for it.
The document that proves the arrangement is Lang’s own advertisement, printed in the trade paper the aggrieved restaurateurs all read.
The lawsuit
On 23 October, a few weeks after the festival, the Wiesn restaurateurs formed a commission of three, Ludwig Blößl of Augustiner, Josef Fendt of Unionsbräu and Alois Wohlmuth of Pschorrbräu, and with a lawyer went after the city. They sued for 15,690 Mark in damages, Krennmair reports from the trade paper. For scale, the city’s entire income from auctioning every stall that year was 37,500 Mark, so they were asking for more than two fifths of it.
The court rejected the claim on 24 April 1899. They appealed. In December the appellate court rejected that too, and left them with all the costs.
What happened to everyone
In 1900 the Oktoberfest restaurateurs founded an association of their own and unanimously elected Georg Lang its first chairman, though he had no local licence and some of its members had just sued the city over his tent. Counsellor Nagler, who had denied promising him anything, was made honorary president. By 1903 Lang was running an Augustiner tent on the Wiesn, which the oktoberfest.de history captions as his.
Lang died in October 1904, of bowel cancer, at 38. Krennmair gives the date as the 4th; German Wikipedia, citing the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten of 14 October, gives the 12th.
And in 1907, nine years after the scandal, the small stalls of the Wirtsbudenring were cleared away and replaced by six festival halls belonging to Munich’s major breweries. The rule that only Munich breweries may pour does not date from then: oktoberfest.de rests it on the Munich and German purity laws and a Munich court ruling of 1990. What 1907 settled was the shape of the modern Wiesn.
You can still drink the 1895–96 line-up
Most of it, anyway. Schneider Weisse is brewed by the same family firm whose wheat beer was poured at that first Weißbier stall. Kulmbacher is still in Kulmbach. And Dreher of Kleinschwechat, whom Krennmair calls the original inventors of Vienna lager, first poured at the Wiesn in 1895.
Companion pieces: September is Oktoberfest, on the beer in the tents today, and UK Oktoberfest Events 2026, on where Britain is pouring.