Oktoberfest: not everyone is happy behind the smiles and the beer

There are some vistas that once seen are never forgotten. The Grand Canyon in Arizona, the lavender fields of Provence and – one for your bucket list – the majestic beer tents of Munich’s Oktoberfest.

These impossibly large spaces, 21 in all, are cathedrals of old-fashioned Bavarian hospitality: high roofs bedecked with garlands and ribbons, pew-like beer benches for 7,000 people and, instead of an altar, a raised platform for the band.

On Saturday morning, after a two-year pandemic abstinence, the cheers will be extra loud when Munich mayor Dieter Reiter uses a mallet to tap the first Oktoberfest beer keg, proclaiming “O’zapft is!” – it’s tapped.

With that the world’s largest (drinking) festival – now in its 187th edition – can get under way until October 3th. Locals refer to the Munich Oktoberfest as the “Wiesn” after its location on the sprawling 42 hectare Theresienwiese (Theresa’s Meadow). It is named after Princess Theresa, whose marriage to Bavarian King Ludwig I in 1810 sparked the first Oktoberfest celebration.

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Things have changed a bit since then. In the next two weeks more than six million visitors will down 7.3 million litres of beer at a record price of up to €13.80 per litre krug, up 15 per cent on 2019. Revellers will dance on tables to tunes of a Tellytubby complexity before, exhausted, gobbling up 400,000 roast chickens and 67,000 roast pork knuckles.

It all functions thanks to precise logistics: 12,000 iron-armed servers and behind-the-scenes kitchens that look – and operate – like airport baggage sorting facilities.

Theoretically the Oktoberfest is about families, and there are fun fair stalls, rollercoasters and other rides. But once the beer kicks in, grown-up visitors prefer the free entertainment walking around: women in busty dirndls and the tanned calves of young, lederhosen-wearing men.

It remains to be seen, however, how this year’s festival will deal with an unwanted guest who has lingered too long at the fair: Covid-19.

After two years of pandemic cancellations – and despite another infection wave looming – Mayor Dieter Reiter is insistent – defiant even – that he made the right call to give people back their Oktoberfest. “This is about winning back confidence, without causing too much of a risk,” he said. “We are sending a signal from Munich that it is possible, even in difficult times like these, to celebrate for a few hours.”

Organisers say many visitors are likely to be just over a Covid infection or vaccinated, meaning the health risks this year are not as grave now from singing, dancing and kissing strangers. Anyone who enters a packed tent with thousands of others, organisers argue, knows what they are here for: to forget the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis.

“It’s not cheap but I’ve been saving two years for this and I’m ready to go,” said Isabel, a 26-year-old Munich student on Friday.

But Covid-19 experts at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University disagree, with one telling a city newspaper: “On a scale of one to 10, the likelihood of Covid-19 exposure after hours in a beer tent lies around 9. You can’t get much higher than that.”

Beyond health concerns, the return of the Wiesn season has revived familiar complaints that what started as a festival for locals has become too big, too commercial, too loud, too touristy. Munich residents are a hardened lot but many enjoyed the two-year break from drunken Australians vomiting in their front gardens.

Many Munich residents head out to smaller beer festivals in smaller towns, rolling their eyes at Munich city hall’s insistence that the big Oktoberfest is about tradition.

But as the entertaining German Netflix series Oktoberfest: Beer and Blood, demonstrates: greed and sharp practices have, from the start, been a part of this festival’s tradition. For instance only members of the Munich Brewers’ Association can sell their beer at the Oktoberfest – and it hasn’t accepted new members since 1970.

The most vocal critic of this rule is Luitpold Prinz von Bayern, owner of the König Ludwig brewery and great grandson of the last Bavarian king. After a series of unsuccessful legal cases, he sees an irony in the city locking out from the Oktoberfest the very family in whose honour it was established.

Munich city hall insists its rules protect traditional local brewers. Luitpold von Bayern points out that most “local” beers sold at the Wiesn – Franziskaner, Löwenbräu, Paulaner – are now owned, either wholly or in part, by international consortiums like Anheuser-Busch and Heineken.

“I don’t think these breweries need special protection,” he told The Irish Times. “This is a cartel but so far the city of Munich has stayed true to this cartel.”