Another Year, Another Oktoberfest Begins
I am on my way to my 22nd in a row (minus the two COVID years) , but how much longer can 'we' keep doing this?
It began on the 21st of September at noon. The Munich mayor, Dieter Reiter, pounded a tap into the wooden barrel containing 90 liters of perfectly-chilled “Wies’n” beer, a slightly heavier lager beer brewed just for the three-week festival by the six participating breweries, and shouted the long-awaited, “o’zapft is’ (it’s tapped).”
From the moment, beers began pouring in the 14 festival tents, the average size coming in at around 5000 souls, and this year, within two and a half hours, the first “victim” was unconscious and being raced off to the first aid tent. The 24-year-old American woman was passed out with alcohol poisoning. 659 others would join her that day in the tent, some in the hospitals where IVs are administered, and the revelers are brought back to “life.”
I have been to 23 Oktoberfests, my first being in 1999 when I was creating our beer brand in Russia and preparing to brew Munich’s Lowenbrau beer in St. Petersburg, and that year, I ended up — somehow — in my room, on my bed, naked. My clothes were in a pile on the floor. I recall not having any, not knowing where my hotel was, but the kind taxi driver — who I today call “Jesus” because I think the son of God came down to see that I got home safely — drove around until I recognized it. He then asked for 30 Deutsche marks, but when I dug into my pocket, I realized I had nothing left. He laughed and told me to have a safe walk to my room.
Over the years, there have been crazier tales, like waking up in a train that had left Munich and was sitting in a depot somewhere. It turned out the train had gone down the tracks a bit from the main Munich station, and the workers couldn’t wake me. I eventually woke up, and they gave me an orange safety vest to walk back to the station, radioing the whole time, “he’s coming.” The beauty of this festival beer is that as strong as it may be, it is also divinely pure. I figured I had been asleep for three hours and was already sober enough to get a later dinner and read.
For all of the excess and all of the hell we put our bodies through, the Oktoberfest is the greatest party in the world. It is not aggressive. There usually aren’t fights. In all of the years, there was one terrorist attack, and it was by a neo-Nazi in 1980. 13 people were killed, including the perpetrator. When you are at the festival, singing along with 8000 people, clinking large mugs of beer with creamy snowball heads on them, you understand that if aliens from another world were watching at that moment, then they’d be envious of us humans. All of the primitive callings for us to be a part of a group, celebrate life, and lose ourselves in the power and energy of a crowd where you can’t possibly know 99.9 percent of those around you scream that we are all somehow, inexplicably linked.
And that life does not have to be as complicated, hateful, deadly, and bleak as so many people make it. When you sing John Denver’s hit song “Country Roads” with 8000 other people, and your eyes catch a complete stranger’s eyes, you know exactly how much joy that person feels at that moment.
As much as I love this annual trip to Munich, my beer hajj with good friends, I recall the stifling heat of the past summer. I am stunned by the meters of snow on mountaintops in Austria from a freak September blizzard. I am frightened by the potential of being washed away by a rapidly rising river in the valleys of Austria and Bavaria. Floods are tearing up Central Europe, and fires are burning in Portugal.
This past summer, I was shocked at how hot 40 degrees Celsius is. I barely controlled a panic attack as I drove my family up and up into the mountains in Portugal, where the temperature was 41 (105) and the car was running on fumes. In Portugal, you can drive for a long time without seeing other people, and this was one of those times. We had no water, and I had to keep the air off. I really feared that we would not make it to a gas station. We made it 20 miles later as we descended the other side of the mountain. I was so happy that I inexplicably bought a belt that was being sold at the gas station.
Oktoberfest is an example of humanity’s goodness but also an example of the gluttony that has brought this world to the brink. As much as I will have the “time of my life.” starting tomorrow and ending on Sunday, a little voice in my head will say, “We can’t keep going on like this.”
In my four days there, I will leave a Yeti-sized carbon footprint, and I am beginning to ask myself: Is this worth it? What am I leaving my son and his generation? What kind of example is this?
I don’t have the answer to this right now, but I know that as good as it is, it is still not right. The simple process of making beer is terrifically unsustainable. Well, prost!
