Oktoberfest Trivia: Facts You Probably Didn't Know About the World's Biggest Beer Festival

Oktoberfest didn't start as a beer festival at all — it began on 12 October 1810 as a public celebration of the wedding between Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later King Ludwig I) and Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. The meadow where the celebrations were held was named Theresienwiese in the princess's honor, and Münchners still call the festival grounds "die Wiesn" today, a nod to that name well over two centuries later.

The event that turned a one-off wedding party into an annual tradition was a horse race, not beer — the citizens of Munich enjoyed the celebrations so much that they repeated the race the following year, and it became a fixture that eventually grew into the festival known today.

2026 marks the 191st Oktoberfest, running from 19 September to 4 October — 18 days. The exact dates shift slightly every year by design: the festival always ends on the first Sunday of October, extending to 3 October if that Sunday falls too early in the month, which is why some years run 16 days and others run closer to three weeks.

It has been cancelled 26 times across its history — for reasons ranging from the Napoleonic Wars (1813) and two cholera epidemics (1854 and 1873), to the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars, both World Wars, the hyperinflation crisis of the Weimar Republic in 1923–24, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, which cancelled both the 2020 and 2021 festivals.

Only beer brewed within Munich's city limits, following the Reinheitsgebot (Germany's centuries-old beer purity law), is allowed to be served at Oktoberfest — six breweries qualify: Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Löwenbräu, Paulaner, Spaten, and Hofbräu. It's why the same six names appear across every tent, year after year, rather than a rotating cast of craft breweries.

A "Maß" — the standard one-liter beer mug everyone pictures when they think of Oktoberfest — isn't cheap anymore. In 2026, a Maß of Festbier costs between €14.80 and €15.90 depending on the tent, and prices have climbed steadily almost every year since the festival began tracking them.

Recent attendance has hovered around 6–7 million visitors a year — about 6.5 million in 2025, 6.7 million in 2024, and an all-time record of roughly 7.2 million in 2023, a number larger than the population of several entire European countries, all passing through one meadow in southern Munich over just over two weeks.

Around 478 individual food and drink businesses are approved to operate at Oktoberfest 2026, together providing roughly 120,000 seats — which sounds enormous until you remember that on the festival's busiest days, far more people are on the grounds standing, walking between tents, or queueing than could ever sit down at once.