Essay18 September 2026 · Beer history · Festivals

September is Oktoberfest

The Wiesn opens tomorrow at noon and runs until 4 October. It began 216 years ago, in 1810, but this is only its 191st edition: Oktoberfest has been officially cancelled 26 times. At midday the Lord Mayor of Munich taps the first keg in the Schottenhamel tent and shouts “O’zapft is!” — a ritual the festival has kept since 1950 — and only then does the beer start flowing.

When most people picture Oktoberfest they think of lederhosen and dirndls, oompah bands, litre steins, bratwurst, schnitzel and sauerkraut. They also assume it happens in October and that the beer is Märzen. The reality is a little different.

The name has travelled further than almost any other in beer — to Brazil, to Ontario, to Ohio, to a Methodist mission hall on Peter Street in Manchester. Say “Oktoberfest” in four countries and you will not be handed the same drink twice — and the oldest of them is not the one in Munich. Munich quietly changed it decades ago, from the amber Märzen to the pale, dry Festbier now poured in the tents.

Munich changed the beer, and kept the name

The festival beer used to be dark — closer to a Munich dunkel than to anything poured in the tents now. The turn came in 1872. A hot summer had run the festival’s cellar dry, and Michael Schottenhamel put on a Vienna-style beer instead — brewed by the Franziskaner-Leist brewery, where Josef Sedlmayr had spent a year working the style up, and sold as Ur-Märzen. Märzen for the month it was made in: brewed in March, before summer brewing stopped, and lagered through the warm months to be drunk in autumn. It was stronger and dearer than the beer it replaced, and it sold out. Bock-strength festival lagers held on until the First World War, and between the wars the beer wandered anywhere from 4% to 9%, settling into the reddish-brown colour the world now calls Märzen.

Then Munich moved again. Over the second half of the twentieth century its brewers lightened the festival beer into the pale, dry Festbier the tents pour today — a beer engineered to be drunk by the litre for sixteen days. It is an excellent beer and a genuine piece of engineering. It is also not what was in the Schottenhamel tent in 1890.

So the most traditional festival in beer is pouring its newest recipe, and has been for fifty-odd years.

America kept the beer Munich abandoned

The country with no historical claim on the festival at all is the one that preserved its beer. The American Oktoberfest is a Märzen: amber to deep copper, malt-forward, bread crust and caramel and toffee, typically 5–6% — a shade stronger, sweeter and more caramelised than the German article, and often carrying more hop bitterness than German brewers would bother with.

The keepers of the flame are doing it properly. Jack's Abby's Copper Legend is built on imported Pilsner, Vienna and Munich malts and decoction-mashed, which is a laborious old-world technique nobody adopts by accident. Shiner's Oktoberfest runs Munich and caramel malts against Hallertau Tradition and Hersbrucker hops. Neither is chasing what Munich is pouring. Both are brewing what Munich used to pour, thousands of miles from the field where Munich stopped pouring it.

And now one of them has crossed over

Here is the part that makes 2026 worth writing down. Firestone Walker’s Oaktoberfest was a Märzen-style lager of Vienna and Munich malts, part-fermented in oak barrels — a thoroughly Californian way to treat a Bavarian style, and a beer they built a season around. This year they have switched to a 6% golden Festbier brewed with Mahrs Bräu of Bamberg, on Bamberger Pilsen malt, and in their own words inspired by the modern Festbiers poured in the tents of Munich. An American brewery that built a season on the old beer has just gone to Bavaria for the new one.

Sierra Nevada’s is not the same thing, whatever the timing suggests. Theirs is golden and 6% this year, brewed with Hoppebräu of Waakirchen, but they have been making a German-collaboration Festbier for years and rotating the partner each time. That is a passport stamp, not a conversion. Jack’s Abby and Shiner, meanwhile, have not moved an inch.

So the flip is real and it is narrow. Munich pours the new beer. America kept the old one — and the brewery that built a season on it has just brewed the other.

Britain chose both

You would expect the exports to be the nostalgic ones. For half of Britain it is the other way round: the importers are the most Munich-faithful room of the lot.

Albert’s Schloss opens its Oktoberfest tomorrow — the same morning as the Wiesn — and runs to 25 October across Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Soho, pouring all six Munich Oktoberfest breweries across tap and tank. Not beers in the style of the Wiesn. The actual Wiesn beers, which means the pale modern Festbier, which means Manchester is drinking exactly what Munich is drinking.

Head of Steam are running theirs for exactly the Wiesn’s sixteen days, 19 September to 4 October: German beer, two-pint steins, pretzels and live music. Both chains open on the same Saturday as Munich; only one of them stops when Munich does.

Then there is the other half, brewing its own — and this is where the vocabulary stops meaning anything and starts being fun. Polly’s in north Wales went out last autumn at 5.7% with a can called Festbier – Märzen: both answers at once, the two beers this whole piece is about printed on one can. This year’s is announced and not yet poured. Verdant, in Cornwall, have brewed all three — a Dunkel, a smoked Märzen and a Festbier — and are throwing their own Oktoberfest on Saturday: the festival’s whole history in three cans. Indie Rabble, in Windsor, open on the same Saturday as Munich with Löwenbräu’s and Hacker-Pschorr’s Oktoberfestbiers on tap and the first pour of their own 5.2% Märzen beside them: the modern answer and the old one, a few feet apart.

The events go the same way. RedWillow’s Lager & Sausage festival opens on Park Green in Macclesfield on Saturday at noon — the same hour as the Wiesn — with a ceremonial cask tapping and an oompah band: Munich’s opening ritual, transplanted into a vessel Munich would not recognise.

Which is the clue to what Britain is actually doing. Fyne Ales, at Cairndow in Argyll, call theirs a Bavarian Fest Bier: 5.5%, amber to chestnut, with a little cherrywood-smoked malt in it, unfiltered and naturally settled — and they rack it into cask. It is brewed by Yvonne Wernlein, a third-generation German brewer, as a tribute to the cask beers of Franconia. A German, in Scotland, sending a festival lager out through a handpump.

Put like that, the cask is the whole British argument in one vessel. Munich’s Festbier is built to be cold, bright and briskly carbonated, drunk fast by the litre. Pull a festival lager soft and settled at cellar temperature and you have changed the beer before anyone has argued about the recipe — which, given that two centuries of Oktoberfest consist of exactly that manoeuvre, is less a liberty than an inheritance. Yesterday, during Cask Ale Week, we made the case for the handpump as the thing Britain kept. This is the same argument from the other end: the most traditional festival in beer quietly stopped keeping its own.

None of it is preservation and none of it is replication. America kept a style; Munich engineered one; Britain treats the whole German festival vocabulary as a licence — borrow the words, brew what you fancy, tap a cask, book the oompah band. Given that the festival’s own history is a story of quietly changing the recipe and keeping the name, that may be the most Bavarian behaviour on offer.

The festival travelled further than the beer

The name has outgrown the beer entirely in places. Blumenau in Santa Catarina has run one since 1984; Kitchener–Waterloo in Ontario bills itself as Canada’s Greatest Bavarian Festival; Oktoberfest Zinzinnati in Cincinnati, first held in 1976, is holding its fiftieth this very weekend. All three draw crowds in the high hundreds of thousands.

All three are billed as the biggest Oktoberfest outside Germany. They count differently enough that the contest cannot be settled, and the winner was never the interesting part. Three separate countries, each certain it is holding the real thing, in a festival whose home city quietly changed the recipe.

Oktoberfest isn’t really in October

It was not a harvest festival. It was a wedding. On 12 October 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen and Munich was invited to the party on the fields outside the city gates — fields still named the Theresienwiese after the bride, which is why Germans call the whole thing the Wiesn. The only event was a horse race. The agricultural show, the part that makes it look like a harvest festival, was bolted on the following year.

It is not really in October either. Drinkers had been complaining about the Bavarian cold since the 1820s, so the festival was walked steadily forward into the milder end of September, and by around 1905 it had settled there for good. It keeps the name by finishing on the first Sunday in October — the 4th, this year — which means that of the sixteen days of the 191st Oktoberfest, twelve of them fall in September. The one thing everybody thinks they know about the festival, that it is the October one, has been wrong for over a century.

Nor was the beer ever fresh. A Märzen is, by definition, the oldest beer in the cellar rather than the newest — brewed in March, drunk in October. A festival celebrating the harvest by serving the previous spring's beer is not a harvest festival, it is a clearing-out. The genuinely harvest-fresh beer in this story is green hop — hops in the copper within twelve hours of being picked — and nobody has built a sixteen-day festival on it, because you cannot: it is gone in a fortnight.

So the month is wrong, the harvest was never there, and the beer was chosen for having sat still the longest. Almost nothing about Oktoberfest is what most people think it is.

The one thing that travelled intact

For all that, there is one part of Oktoberfest that travelled, and it is not in the glass. In the Munich tents, two or three times an hour, the band stops whatever it is playing and starts Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit. A few thousand people put down their conversations, pick up a litre of beer and sing a toast to Gemütlichkeit, a word English has never managed to import: warmth, ease, the specific contentment of being among people with no particular need to be anywhere else. Then comes the count — Oans, zwoa, drei, g'suffa! One, two, three, drink — and the room drinks together.

That is Munich’s clock, and the clock did not travel. The song did. They sing Ein Prosit in Blumenau, in Kitchener, in Cincinnati, and in that Manchester mission hall at teatime — some rooms often, some when the mood takes them, none of them translating it. Every country in this piece changed the beer. Not one of them changed the words. The festival was never really about a recipe. It was about the interval at which strangers agree to become a crowd, and that exports beautifully, in any colour of lager you like.

Companion pieces: Everything Traditional About Oktoberfest Is Younger Than the Tent — how the giant tent arrived in 1898, through five strawmen and a lawsuit, and why the six-brewery rule only dates from 1907. And UK Oktoberfest Events 2026, for where Britain is pouring.