A couple towns over from Nuremberg is the university town of Erlangen, home to the Bergkirchweih (aka the Berg)-- an annual, 12-day long outdoor beer festival that dates to 1755. This fest is well-known to Germans, but not so much to foreigners, making it distinctly more "German"-- and Bavarian-- than Munich's internationally renowned Oktoberfest.
The photos I did manage to take don't quite spell out the enormity of the event-- the dedicated Berg grounds are over a half-mile in size, multi-tiered on a hillside and include amusemment park rides. Multiple breweries set up shop in their dedicated "kellers," basically concrete bunkers, and all they do is pump out a special festival beer-- a high-alcohol brew served exclusively in one liter (over 1 quart) mugs. Even though our group of 4 (an English couple invited us) got there fairly early in the day, we were still lucky to find seats, and we set to the task at hand-- drinking some fine beer at a leisurely pace on a nice sunny day.
This was our first-ever beer fest, anywhere, and I was seriously impressed-- for a start, the Bavarians have a beer-fest uniform, and I'd guess that maybe 20% of the crowd were wearing theirs-- checkered shirts and suede leather knickers (lederhosen), socks and special shoes for the guys (after a time, we started calling them "drinking pants"), and a tradtitional, usually colorful dress for the ladies. Our English friends were blown away at the mellow vibe-- they told us that if you got this many British or Irish folks in one place and added beer, there would be brawls everywhere. With live bands playing every couple hundred feet (usually stationed above the concrete bier kellers, playing everything from American hard rock to German drinking songs), the place was jumping, and the sense of camaraderie was palpable-- everybody was high-fiving, toasting (saying "Prost!" while clinking glasses and maintaining eye-contact with your fellow toaster), linking up arms and singing and swaying to the music. Pretty cool stuff. The experience really felt like walking into a bear hug from some sweaty, besotted stranger, and it was oddly comforting-- imagine being at a party with 15,000 of your closest friends you don't know. As day progressed into night, the crowds only got bigger, and there were easily 20,000 people looking to sit down in the roughly 11,000 seats (Berg festival attendance averages 1 million visitors over the 12 days, and it seemed like all of them came on that night). We slipped out of there at 9:30 and took the train home, pleasantly buzzed and feeling a little more at home here in Germany.
1 comment:
I am so jealous! What an awesome time. Do you guys have more pictures? G, what kind of beer were you drinking? Remember what they called it?
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