Original photo by Nikada/ iStock
Cooler weather, shorter days, and changing leaves are small harbingers of one undeniable truth: Oktoberfest is at hand. Most years (except 2020 and 2021) since 1810, the German town of Munich has erected massive beer tents (some capable of seating 6,000 people), tapped kegs filled with liquid masterpieces such as helles, Pilsner, and hefeweizen, and held the world-renowned beer celebration called Oktoberfest — the largest beer festival in the world. Although Germany will likely never relinquish their beer-guzzling crown, a few towns around the world hold similar Bavarian bashes that rival the original. One of the biggest is the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest, held about 75 miles west of Toronto. Established with only $200 back in 1969, the festival has exploded in popularity in the ensuing decades, and regularly attracts more than 700,000 people — including Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who opened the 2016 festival by tapping its first keg.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a fibAlthough it’s impossible to know where the first beer was brewed for certain, the boozy beverage likely coincided with the arrival of grain agriculture 12,000 years ago. The first concrete evidence of barley beer comes from the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria).
While the event in Kitchener-Waterloo is a leading candidate for the world’s largest beer festival outside Germany, it does have some competitors. Its biggest rival comes from a country intimately familiar with throwing big parties: Brazil. Today, the town of Blumenau in southern Brazil is known as “Little Germany” because it was founded by German pharmacist Hermann Bruno Otto Blumenau in 1850 alongside 17 other German immigrants. Around 30% of the town is now of German descent, so it makes sense that Blumenau holds a 19-day-long Oktoberfest against the backdrop of the town’s German-style architecture.
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To begin Oktoberfest, Munich’s mayor taps the first keg and says “______!” (“It’s tapped!”)
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To begin Oktoberfest, Munich’s mayor taps the first keg and says “O’zapft is!” (“It’s tapped!”)
The first Oktoberfest was actually a wedding celebration.
On October 12, 1810, Prince Regent Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen. Five days later, all the locals were invited to take part in the royal couple’s marital bliss by celebrating at a party complete with a horse race on a large open field outside the city. The gathering was such a success, the town decided to have another party (and horse race) the next year, and then a third one in 1812. By 1818, drink stands began supplying the beer, and by 1896, those stands had transformed into tents. While this Bavarian couple isn’t a household name today, their wedding reception, now known as Oktoberfest, is technically the longest wedding celebration in human history. Missing only a handful of years due to wars or pandemics, Oktoberfest remains the largest beer festival in the world. Although at first glance the original intent of the celebration appears lost amid untold gallons of lagers and ales, its legacy lives on in at least one small way. Every year since its inception, Munich’s Oktoberfest takes place on the same stretch of ground that celebrated the royal couple’s union all those years ago. It’s known as Theresienwiese, or “Therese’s fields.”
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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