Essay20 September 2026 · Beer history · Oktoberfest

Everything Traditional About Oktoberfest Is Younger Than the Tent

Yesterday’s companion piece 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 today, and America kept the old one. That is one pillar of “tradition” turning out to be recent. This is the other two.

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 and added the argument; the digging is his.

What the Wiesn looked like before

The beer stalls stood in the Wirtsbudenring, a ring of wooden booths laid out by municipal decree in 1825. They were small by deliberate policy. The Bayerische Gastwirths-Zeitung recorded the maximum permitted dimensions for 1888: 4.4 metres tall, 7.3 metres wide, 10 metres long. A modern Wiesn tent seats more people than lived in most Bavarian villages at the time.

The beer was not standardised either, and this is the part that should stop anyone mid-sentence who is about to use the word authentic. In 1895 and 1896 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 — the first year the festival had a dedicated Weißbier stall. Austrian beer. Czech beer. Franconian beer. At the Oktoberfest.

The auction, and the five men who were not really bidding

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: 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.

Two weeks later, five restaurateurs applied to combine their stalls into a single large tent 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 — it was the reason they had bid at all. Nagler denied promising anything. He also observed, tartly, 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, 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 the permit anyway. One vote against, from Heindl.

Six thousand seats and fifty thousand songbooks

The advertisement ran on 25 September. Lang’s 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 given away free so the room could sing along. 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, Franz Kleber at stall 25. The beer was Märzenbier, brewed specially for it.

It is worth pausing on that. The document that proves the arrangement is the brewery’s own advertising, printed in the trade paper the aggrieved restaurateurs all read.

The lawsuit

A month after the festival, the Wiesn restaurateurs formed a commission — Ludwig Blößl of Augustiner, Josef Fendt of Unionsbräu, Alois Wohlmuth of Pschorrbräu — hired a lawyer, and went after the city. They sued for 15,690 Mark in damages. For scale, the city’s entire income from auctioning every stall that year was 37,500 Mark: they were asking for something over a third of the takings.

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

Augustiner built a tent twice the size of Lang’s in 1903. In 1900 the Oktoberfest restaurateurs founded an association of their own and unanimously elected Georg Lang its first chairman — the outsider without a local licence, chosen to lead the men who had just sued the city over his tent. Counsellor Nagler, who had denied promising him anything, was made honorary president.

Lang died on 4 October 1904, of bowel cancer. He was 38.

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 defines the modern Wiesn — six breweries, nobody else — is not ancient custom. It is the settlement that followed the fight.

You can still drink the 1896 line-up

Most of it, anyway. Schneider Weisse is brewed by the same family firm that took the festival’s first wheat-beer stall. Kulmbacher is still in Kulmbach. And the Vienna lager that Dreher of Kleinschwechat brought to the Theresienwiese is the direct ancestor of Märzen itself — which is to say the beer the festival is nostalgic for arrived, once, as an import.

Companion pieces: September is Oktoberfest, on the beer in the tents today, and UK Oktoberfest Events 2026, on where Britain is pouring.