Guide to Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany

HELLO BUCKET LIST!! Oktoberfest is a once in a lifetime experience!! It truly is an event that not only lives up to the hype, but exceed expectations. Which is saying something because I had pretty high expectations before going to the festival.

Oktoberfest has a special magic about it…it somehow manages to not be a ‘tourist trap’ or sell out festival to make money. It is for everyone and anyone from German to Australian to Polish, to Indian, to American, whatever! At that, Oktoberfest, is for any age group. Grandparents were enjoying the more traditional tents, kids rode the rides, and 20-year olds partied at Hofbräu tent. Oktoberfest is such a great way to connect with both Germans and fellow travelers in an energetic environment.

Oktoberfest is not just a place to go get drunk (I mean it is), but it is about SO much more than that. It is really about human connection. And sharing that human connection over a round of beers. Funny how beer lowers inhibitions and allow you to make friends! Thank you Germany for the community style seating, you are really onto something. What is great about this festival, say compared to a music festival, is that the event is about being with each other. You can actually talk and hear each other throughout most of the day.

You are pretty much forced to make friends with your neighbors, ask questions, and learn about their way of life and their language. By night, after much intoxication, you get up on the tables and dance and cheers and be merry! What a way to celebrate human life, the Bavarian culture, and a collection of people who are from all over the world, with different histories and languages, all coming together to ‘Prost’!

History of Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest began with the King of Bavaria marrying off his daughter and throwing a huge party with free beer for all. The next year, the kingdom pleaded with the King to throw the party again on the anniversary of the marriage and this time the King said he would but he would make the people pay for the beer and food that year and so Oktoberfest was born! 2019 Oktoberfest represents the 186th Oktoberfest!! I don’t know how their marriage went, but what a wedding that must have been to inspire this event!! Thank god history created this spectacular event we have today, and what a funny beginning to it all.

Today, people travel from all over the world to go to Oktoberfest. There are 15 main beer tents that can fit up to 10,000 people each. The tables are all community style so you share a long table with your neighbors and you are packed in tight! The festival grounds are absolutely huge and look like a giant fair with carnival rides and games. Want to read more about the history? Check this out.

When is it

First of all, Oktoberfest is actually two weeks in September, and always ends on the first weekend of October. While it is probably a crap shoot either way, I figured the earlier in September you go, the better the weather. Depends on the year, but you can get clear skies and 70 degrees or upper 50s and rain. I had one gloomy day with a little sprinkles here and there. Luckily, it was sunny out the other day and I got done most of the rides during this time. When you are planning your trip, be mindful of what days you go on. Weekends will be far busier than weekdays.

Another thing to keep in mind on the weather, is that it will be cold enough outside to bring a jacket, but way too hot with the body heat in the beer tent. This means keeping track of a jacket all day, and when people start standing on tables, this can be frustrating. Do you tie it on your waist? Put it on the ground to get stepped on? Hide it under your table where you will get drunk and forget it? I always ended up hiding it and somehow didn’t forget it. The strange thing is, I didn’t see many other people with this problem. It is like magically everyone had a coat during the day and then didn’t have a coat in the tent…magicians if you ask me!

Getting a seat

Building off that, while it sounds like a lot of fun to be there when it is craziest, it could prove frustrating trying to find a spot to sit. You CANNOT be served if you do not have a seat, except for a few select tents. That is right, if you want to drink, you must find a seat. Whether you are actually sitting on the bench during the day, or if that means standing on the bench at night. You still must be on the bench at the table.

To give you reference, with 2 people mid-week, we never didn’t find a spot, but it wasn’t always easy either. Lots of times, you go up to people and ask to sit down only for a rejection ‘no’ or ‘sorry my mates in the bathroom’. How awkward! If a whole group has a table, even if they let you on, they make it known that it is ‘their’ table. It is often better to sit at a mixed group table where people don’t know each other. I found them friendlier. As I said, we never didn’t find a spot within 5-10 minutes, but I can’t even imagine with a bigger group or if we went on the weekends.

While I’m sure you don’t have control over your group size, certainly 2 people was easiest to get a spot. This allowed for a lot of flexibility and we would go to 4 to 5 tents a day. If you have a group 8 or larger, it makes sense to make a table reservation. That way, you and all your friends get to sit next to each other and you don’t have to stress about finding a place to sit! The only downside is that you are restricted to the tent you have a reservation for, and don’t have the flexibility to tent hop.

I have to imagine the worst group size is 3-7, especially as you get closer to 7 and you don’t have quite enough people for a table reservation. To combat this, get there early and do NOT switch tents after ~4 or 5pm on weekdays and I would say even earlier on weekends. Get your table, and hold your spots for the evening so you can enjoy the festivities. So, you can definitely still make it work. I would just do more due diligence on the tent(s) you want to see and not hop around after a certain hour.

Beer, beer, and more beer!

The only drink you can get in the beer tents is, you guessed it, beer! You can only buy in the size of 1 liter steins, which is approximately 3 beers in America, and at a higher alcohol content. These steins are exactly what you picture in the movies. A German lady carries 10 over in her hands, which seems impossible, they are so heavy! The beer is filled to the brim.

All beer served at the Oktoberfest tents must be from one of Munich’s six breweries—Paulaner, Spaten, Hacker-Pschorr, Augustiner, Hofbräu and Löwenbräu. Each tent only serves beer from one of the six breweries, meaning you don’t get a choice of what brand of beer once you have selected a tent. The beer must also follow the Reinheitsgebot. This “purity law” was enacted back in 1516 to control beer quality standards, and stipulates rules such as the recipe can only include barley, malt, yeast and hops.

The beer is the ‘Oktoberfest’ flavor only. So at whatever tent you go to, there is no need to order what type of alcohol, what size of beer, what brand, or event what flavor. You get 1 choice and 1 choice only. You will get a stein of Oktoberfest beer and like it! Which shouldn’t be a problem, it is honestly really light and refreshing. I think universally most people can enjoy this type of beer! I personally loved it!!

The beer is around 10 to 15 Euros, but again, it equals out to 3 American beers at a higher alcohol content than American beer. This means you really are getting a great deal! You are getting one American beer for 5-6 USD. I actually ‘enjoyed’ the liter size too because it made it really easy to keep track of how many beers I drank and what beer put me over the edge LOL. Seriously, in America I loose track, and I’m like maybe I had 5? Or 8? Not sure..but here I was like yep, I had 4 liters, and the 4th put me over. While normal me would never drink that much beer, I got super human beer drinking strength at the fest (and no hangovers, go purity laws!).

Funnily enough, I think many people may not quite realize how extensive Oktoberfest is for beer lovers. If you don’t like beer, you may want to reconsider or realize that you may not enjoy the event as much as your friends. Seriously, I tried to order a water and the waitress looked at me like I was crazy. They really only do serve beer.

There is one tent that is a wine tent and not a beer tent. I personally don’t like wine that much so I didn’t check it out. You can also get hard alcohol outside of the tents. So you could get by by getting drinks outside of the tent, but you will realize after a certain hour you cannot hop in and out of tents so easily, so you are stuck in a tent full of beer. If you like beer, no problem, but if you don’t…I’m just warning you. I’m pretty sure Germans just drink beer for water at this point! I’m German on my dads side, and I can definitely see how I am related!!! A bunch of beer lovers 🙂

Paying for beer is honestly super convenient and easy. While it is cash only, you will see why. Since the server only serves one type of beer, you just order 1 beer please, she brings you the beer, and you give cash. No tab, no settling up, no splitting charges on credit cards. Simple, easy. You will really appreciate this when its busy because no matter how busy, I never waited longer than a few minutes for a beer. It never crossed my mind, ‘oh she is taking a while’ or ‘where is my beer?’. It was always ‘Damn, that was so fast!’. Especially in American, servers can be slow sometimes and its freaking obnoxious, but that is not a problem here. In fact, Germans are ridiculously timely in general, and I love that. Like public transportation is on time, tours leave on time, beer arrives fast, what a concept!

The food

For the food, unlike the beer, you get a full menu. You order just like any other restaurant, except you pay right away in cash. Easy enough! They are pretty fast with the food too and everything was delicious. I will say, people start standing on the tables as early as 6pm on weekdays, so I would order early and be done eating before people are standing on the benches, because feet will be in your eating room and you are asking for something to happen! One day, we forgot to eat until 7pm and we hurriedly ate as everyone was standing next to our food, dancing drunk around us. I never ate so fast to ensure someone didn’t step in it and I could return to standing on the bench and enjoying the festivities with everyone else!

You can also get food outside of the beer tents. There are a lot of stands, like at a fair. The food at Oktoberfest is traditional German food. Lots of pretzels, meat, dumpling, potatoes, and gravy. Just like Thanksgiving, yum!!

The bathroom

Okay, I know an odd subject to bring up, but I think a good discussion. Ever been to an American sporting event or concert? Ever tried using the bathroom? What about the girls bathroom line? Yeah its like an hour long and totally horrible, especially when your drinking beer. I was soo worried that I would be miserable to waiting in bathroom lines all day and I can say I never waited more than 5 minutes and most of the time there wasn’t a wait at all! Again, the Germans are efficient people, they knew what they were doing! They have huge banks of stalls and it is super quick, making the bathroom a total non-issue! Thank god! Because like beer makes you piss…lol…Also, my co-worker told me you have to pay to go to the bathroom there, but this is not a thing at Oktoberfest. The guys bathroom is troughs I think, but I’m not a guy so not totally sure.

One thing to keep in mind, and seriously, please keep this in mind. Make a mental image of where your table is in relation to the bathroom when you are getting up to go to the bathroom!!!!! Sounds silly, but once you get out of the bathroom, legit all the tables look the exact same, yes even sober, and the tent all looks the same inside so there is no frame of reference…and people start standing up on the benches so you can’t just see through the crowd to locate your table. It is SO easy to loose where your table is.

Depending on your level of intoxication, it may be easy enough to logically think about it and just walk around until you find it….butttt…..the drunker you get the easier it is to be like wtf do I do and the whole tent turns into a giant freaking maze. My boyfriend (which he will kill me for saying this) got lost coming back from the bathroom late at night and I had to leave the tent to go find him, and we were both drunk enough that we couldn’t find each other and had to meet back up at home (which was luckily close). Don’t be us folks…know the path back to your table! Also have a meet up plan if you can’t locate each other. Meet by the front of say one of the tents or by a large ride that is hard to miss.

Rides

Oktoberfest is a huge fairgrounds essentially that has tons of rides! They are around 10 or so Euro and such a blast! Do it early in the day because the rides are known to make drunk people throw up. I saw at least one person puking after one of the rides. Don’t necessarily want to see beer come up that way hahaha. Do the rides they are SO much fun. Plus, the day is just too long to non-stop drink, so it is a good way to mix up the day. It does get a little pricey after a few rides, but it is worth it. And again, once in a lifetime experience.

The tents

As I said, the beer halls are all in giant tents that fit thousands of people. They each have their own personality. Hofbräu Tent is my personal favorite! The tents do blur together for me though, especially after a few beers, so please check out this guide to learn more about the tents, and pick out which ones you want to go to!

What to expect from the event

The event is so much better than you ever could have imagined!! What you can expect is thousands of people, either dressed in traditional Bavarian clothing or normal civilian clothes, all marching together to go to the fairgrounds in the morning or early afternoon. The grounds feel much like the biggest fair you have ever seen with tons of rides, food vendors, and beer halls. The energy walking around is out of this world. Once you enter a beer tent, you find an open seat (choose wisely as you meet your neighbors), and order a beer!

From there, you get to meet all these wonderful people. Often times it starts out how long you are in Munich, if you have traveled to Munich before, to where you live and what you do. I met people that are Canadian gold miners, to American pilots, to Italian business men. The people you will meet are so amazing! You can try to scope out who you think would be good to sit next to, but often times there is only so much room open so you sit where there is room! The morning and early afternoon is quiet. You have a lot of room to breathe and sometimes can even have a table to yourself.

As the evening progresses, it starts to get crowded. You loose elbow room, and you may all be shoved on a bench that probably shouldn’t fit that many people. You don’t care though! Because the beer is flowing and you are drinking with new friends! You will hear a song called ‘Ein Prosit‘ over and over and over, and you will love it every time. It plays about every 30 mins at the beginning of the day and works up to about every 10 minutes later in the day. When you hear it, everyone cheers throughout the songs and then takes a big swig of beer at the end. I’m not sure the exact translation but prosit means cheers and it basically repeats that word a bunch of times. ‘Ein’ kind of sounds like ‘I’m’ and prosit means cheers so I kept thinking it said ‘I’m Cheers-ing’, so to this day I still think of the song as standing up, clinking glasses, and singing ‘I’m cheers-ing, I’m cheers-ing, Iiii-mm cheers-ing!’. They also play a lot of Sweet Caroline and this one Germany song that I have no clue what it was called! They play it over and over, it was rather amusing.

As you start to get later in the day, you order your food and then stand up on the benches of the table. Yes EVERYONE stands up. Not just the 20-year old partiers, everyone stands on the table. It is so freaking cool, everyone collectively stands up and parties! After 6 or 7pm it gets rowdy. A lot of the older folks have gone home and the music turns up and becomes less traditional. Arm wrestling, broken glasses, and craziness ensues. This is also the blurriest part of the night. I can’t ever recall the party ever ending. I was always drunk enough from a full day at Oktoberfest and for some odd reason thought it a good idea to take myself home 😉 I know there is an official end time, but it sure didn’t seem like it. That is basically a day in the life of being at Oktoberfest. Incredibly simple, yet purely blissful and merry.

What to wear

As I eluded to before, this is not a sell-out, money driven festival. It felt so…authentic. Part of the authenticity is the traditional Bavarian outfits called Lederhosen (males) and Drindls (females). It was a pretty good mix of people dressed up and people wearing normal outfits. You won’t be out of place either way you go. I would highly recommend dressing up though! It gets you in the spirit, it is fun, and it isn’t a costume! DO NOT buy from Amazon, as I said, it is not a costume and should not look like a costume. Go buy an authentic one in Munich.

There are so many stores around the city, you will have not problem getting one when you get there. Spend a decent chunk of change, north of at least 100 Euros. You want it to be nice! Think of it as an investment in future Halloween outfits! I did, as I mentioned, wear a jacket. I didn’t want to ruin the look, but I knew I would be cold, especially for the rides and walking home at night. I am glad I did. I wore a white North face, which I thought would stick out least with the outfit. I also wore white vans, which matched very well. I would go for similar type of shoes as I did. For more about the traditional Bavarian outfits, check out this guide.

Souvenirs

Lastly, souvenirs! There are a ton of stands and shops for souvenirs, mainly steins. You have to get a stein! Do not try to steal a stein! Like you are not the first person at Oktoberfest to magically have that idea. The security is looking for exactly this. It is a really safe festival, so yes, this is what they are looking for. Stein stealers! Just buy a souvenir stein! That said, I’m sure you don’t want to carry it around all day and by the time you get around to leaving, you won’t even be thinking about souvenirs. Go grab a stein on a day where you are not actually going to the festival. Just stop by in the morning before your train or plane out. You can also go to somewhere like Hofbrauhouse to grab one, this is what I did. They had special Oktoberfest ones and then I didn’t have to walk to Oktoberfest again.

Cost

Oktoberfest isn’t exactly a cheap trip. It isn’t crazy expensive either. It is more pure amount of time that you are at the festival that makes it expensive and the skyrocketing hotel prices. If you book early enough, you can get an Airbnb for two around $300 / night. Food is around 15 Euros. 1 liter of beer is 10 to 15 Euros (honestly a steal). Rides are around 10 Euros. Personally, I rode about 5 rides a day, ate two meals, and around 4 liters of beer. A traditional outfit will run you 100 to 300 Euro depending on the quality you go for. Souvenis are also pretty cheap, again not a sell-out festival trying to penny pinch you. They are about 10 Euro. Bring cash, everything at Oktoberfest is cash only. There are ATMs there, but I would recommend not having to deal with that.

My recommendation for price, book as soon as you know you are going. I would book at least 6 months in advance. This means booking in April. I would book even earlier than this if you can. I personally booked in April and I found a great Airbnb but it looked like one of very few in walking distance to Oktoberfest in our budget, if not the last one left that I saw.

Oh, and the Oktoberfest itself is free! No price for entry! How cool! On that note, unlike many American festivals, there are no metal detectors or lines to get in. You just walk past security, into the festival grounds. As long as you don’t have a big backpack or something, they don’t stop you. So no lines, no wait, no entry price. Beating this point to the ground, but I truly think Germany does a lot of things right! So easy and convenient. Sometimes that can be such a pain at other places.

To add on, it is 100% safe. I felt SO safe in Munich and at Oktoberfest. I could and did (sorry Mom) walk home alone from Oktoberfest to my Airbnb and I felt completely safe. I’m not stupid, and I am someone who is extremely cautious about this kind of thing, so don’t be stupid about it, but it is very safe. Feels safe. Compared to some southern European countries, no one cat calls, there weren’t homeless, etc. And the fact they don’t metal detect, I wasn’t worried about anything happening. They had plenty of security around the grounds and in the grounds.

So that is Oktoberfest! I said it is once in a lifetime, but in my lifetime I truly hope I have multiple once in a lifetime trips to Oktoberfest! In fact, maybe I will make it an every few years thing! That is how much I loved it!!! The community and friendships you will make is what makes this place so special.