Beer Crisis at Oktoberfest

It's not as easy as you might imagine to get a beer at Oktoberfest. No, really I'm serious. I wouldn't have believed it myself if it hadn't happened to me tonight. In a country known for it's beer, in a city known for it's beer festival, at a beer festival known the world over for it's ridiculous consumption of beer, it took over two hours to find a place that would actually serve me and my compatriots a glass of beer. Here is my story...

On Saturday night all I wanted for dinner was to find a little wurst-stand to get some fresh german sausages. Despite scouring the city for an hour and a half, I was unable to find this Utopian sausage stand of my dreams and we ended up eating at some streetside cafe, which incidentally had excellent food but nonetheless wasn't a wurst-stand.

Fast forward to Sunday night when Dirk and I made it down to the Oktoberfest grounds for the first time... we walked through gates of Oktoberfest and were greeted by Bratwurst nirvana. A thousand, nay, a million vendors selling fresh German sausage. The only problem was that I had already eaten :( I vowed to come back the following night to fulfil my gastronomical dream.

So, tonight the goal was simple. I was going to round up the guys and head over to Oktoberfest to partake of the wurst-goodness and drink a few beers while I was at it. Now, I didn't really have plans of getting smashed tonight. I just wanted to have a few beers with dinner. I was saving up my beer-drinking stamina for tomorrow night when the whole GWAVACon conference is planning on heading over to Oktoberfest en-masse for a celebration.

Things got complicated when one of the local Novell consultants got invited along. He is from Munich and seemed to know all about Oktoberfest. He recommended that we stop by a beer garden first and then grab a bite to eat a little later in the evening. Now, I hadn't really planned on stopping by the beer gardens because I figured that they were going to be really crowded and, as mentioned before, I wasn't really in the mood to drink mass quantities of beer tonight. But, I figured that the local guy knew best so I was going to go along with his plan.

Oktoberfest was busting at the seams tonight. It only about 5 minutes to separate our group of 6 into 2 groups of 3. Dirk ended up with the two guys from Europe and Morris, Sundy and I ended up together. After about 30 seconds we gave up on trying to find the other guys and decided to just head to one of the beer gardens. Problem was that everyone that we stopped by had a group of 50 people standing outside of locked doors waiting to get in. It appeared that all of the beer gardens were already operating at maximum capacity and that we were going to have to wait to get a spot.

What made the situation even more dire is that it occurred to us as we were walking around that we hadn't seen a single person drinking a beer outside of one of the beer gardens. We also didn't see a single place to buy beer outside of the beer gardens. So, to get served beer, we had to get into the beer garden, and to get into the beer garden we had to wait.

And so we spent the next 45 minutes waiting to get inside the Hacker-Pfeltzen beer garden. Forty minutes at Oktoberfest with no beer. Seriously I thought I was in a bad dream. Why couldn't they just serve the people outside? I didn't understand. After 45 minutes, we decided to just give up. It's not so much that we got tired of waiting as it was that we were afraid that at the current rate of travel we weren't going to make it in before Oktoberfest shut down for the night. What was the current rate of travel: 0. Not a single person had been let inside in the entire time that we were waiting in line. This is Oktoberfest! Why can't we get a beer.

Of course we could have walked back into town and gotten a beer at one of thousands of pubs in the city, but damnit this was a matter of principle now. Desparate, we started walking around the perimeter of the beer garden structure. Now they were serving a number of people outside of the official building, but you had to have a seat to get served and there just wasn't an inch of space on any one of hundreds of tables that we passed by. Seriously, people were packed 12 deep at tables meant to seat 6. People were sitting on top of each other just to get served beer. It was ridiculous. Can it really be this hard to get a beer at Oktoberfest.

We left the Hacker-Pfeltzen and passed by a number of other beer gardens. Every one of them was in the same boat. With a broken spirit, I reluctantly decided to give up on the idea of having a beer that night. There was good news however. There was nothing preventing me from attaining my goal of eating bratwurst that night. Of course a bratwurst without beer is almost not a bratwurst, but I was willing to make that sacrifice to salvage at least a piece of my dream.

So, we stopped at one of the myriad wurst-stands and a got a metre-long bratwurst. Seriously it was awesome. This thing stuck out from the bun by 6 inches on either side. I slathered it with mustard and started chowing down. Instantly I begun to feel better.

We were on our way out of Oktoberfest when something strange caught my eye. What's that I see over there? Are there people walking around with glasses of beer in their hand? Is there really some place that is actually serving beer to the public without a waiting list??? Indeed there was! Hallelujah! For a brief moment, it occurred to me that there just might be a God out there after all. Granted they weren't serving beer in the litre mugs that Oktoberfest was renowned for, but it was still beer. And not just any beer, it was fresh, it was German and it was good :)

I still can't believe that it took so long to find this place. And I don't understand why they aren't serving beer in a hundred more stands like this. Why on earth would they be holding back? This is, after all, a beer festival, is it not? I'm desperately hoping that tomorrow will give me a different impression of Oktoberfest.