Daniel's question this week is about Oktoberfest, but also about the whole category of festivals humanity has invented for the purpose of drinking together. He wants to know what makes Oktoberfest one of the great beer festivals, what ten of the most epic drinking festivals actually are, ancient and modern, and how the ancient versions compare to the modern ones in scale, purpose, and activities.
And the answer to the last part is that they compare the way a temple compares to a theme park. Same species of gathering, completely different institutional scaffolding.
That's the arc, yeah. Start with the big one, work backward through history, then ask what changed.
Oktoberfest first, then. The founding story is oddly wholesome for what it became. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen in October of 1810, and the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate on the fields outside the city gates. Horse races, agricultural shows, lots of beer. That field is now called the Theresienwiese, named after her, and the festival still happens there every year.
Theresienwiese. The meadow of Therese. Which is a lovely name for what is now essentially a temporary city of beer tents holding over six million people.
Six million plus, annually. And the beer is served in one-liter Maß steins, and here's the part most people don't know: only six Munich breweries are allowed to serve. Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Hofbräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner, Spaten. That's the whole list. It's a cartel, essentially, protected by tradition and city regulation.
A six-brewery cartel that's been running for over two hundred years. That's not a festival, that's a constitutional monarchy.
And that's what makes Oktoberfest great, in the specific sense. It's not the beer selection, which is narrow by craft standards. It's not the rides. It's that the entire city of Munich treats it as a civic identity event. People wear the traditional Tracht, the lederhosen and dirndls. Families go during the day. The tents have personalities, histories, regulars who have been coming for decades. It's a Volksfest, a people's festival, not a beer festival in the American sense.
So the greatness is the embeddedness. It grew out of a wedding, not a marketing plan.
Right, and it took decades to become what it is. The beer tents as we know them didn't really solidify until the late nineteenth century. The horse races eventually disappeared. The agricultural show got spun off. What remained was the drinking, the food, the music, the mass gathering. But the civic identity never left.
Now jump back three thousand years, and you get a festival where the drinking wasn't civic identity. It was divine communication.
The Beautiful Festival of Drunkenness. That's the actual title, and it's my favorite because it's so direct. It was dedicated to the goddess Hathor, and it commemorated a myth about the goddess Sekhmet. Sekhmet was the lion-headed goddess of destruction, and she went on a rampage, slaughtering humanity. The god Ra wanted to stop her, so he flooded the fields with beer dyed red with ochre to look like blood. Sekhmet drank it, got drunk, passed out, and woke up as the gentle Hathor. The festival reenacted that.
So the goal was to get blackout drunk. Deliberately. As a religious act.
Yes. The temple texts describe drinking to the point of unconsciousness, sleeping in the temple courtyard, and then being woken by drumming at dawn. The moment of waking was considered the moment when Hathor could communicate with you. The intoxication was the vehicle for divine contact. It wasn't a party. It was a ritual technology.
That's the thing that separates it from every modern beer festival. Nobody at the Great American Beer Festival thinks they're going to wake up and hear a goddess.
And the Egyptians didn't see it as an excuse. The drinking was the point, but the point was the altered state. The hangover was probably less of a feature, but they had the sense to build the waking-up ritual into the structure.
Now we're at San Fermín, which is the best example of a festival that kept its dangerous ritual core while everything around it commercialized.
Pamplona, Spain, July sixth through fourteenth. The running of the bulls, the encierro, every morning. People run ahead of six fighting bulls through the narrow streets to the bullring. It's eight hundred and seventy-five meters, takes about three minutes, and people get gored and killed with some regularity. Fifteen deaths since 1924, and hundreds of injuries every year.
And the drinking is all night, every night, for nine days. The runners are often still drunk from the night before when the rocket goes off at eight in the morning.
Here's what makes it a modern echo of ancient rites. The festival is technically religious, honoring Saint Fermín, the patron saint of Navarre. But the religious procession is now a small part of it. What people come for is the risk, the ritual, the communal intensity. The possibility of death is not a bug. It's what gives the festival its sacred dimension. It's the closest thing Europe has to a living ancient risk ritual.
And the white clothes and red scarf are a uniform. Everyone wears the same thing. That's not casual. That's a congregation.
It inverts the modern logic. Modern festivals sanitize risk. San Fermín keeps it, and that's precisely why it's still compelling.
Now Holi, which is a spring festival, not a drinking festival per se, but it belongs on this list because of bhang.
Bhang is a cannabis-infused drink, traditionally made with milk, spices, and ground cannabis leaves, and it's consumed especially in North India during Holi as a religious offering. Holi marks the victory of good over evil, the arrival of spring, and it's the festival of colors. But the adult celebration, particularly in places like Varanasi and Mathura, involves bhang lassi and bhang thandai, and the intoxication is understood as devotional. It's Shiva's drink. It's not recreational in the modern sense.
So it's a drinking festival where the drink is not alcohol but a different intoxicant, and the intoxication is still framed as religious. That's a useful reminder that the category isn't just beer.
And it's also a reminder that the category is ancient. Holi has roots going back at least to the fourth century CE, possibly earlier, and the bhang tradition is documented for centuries. It's a living festival that has navigated the modern world without losing its ritual core, though the commercial color runs and the tourist version are increasingly separate from the religious celebration.
The Great American Beer Festival is the opposite of Holi in every way. It was founded in 1982, it's held annually in Denver, and it's the largest ticketed beer festival in the United States. Over four thousand beers from more than eight hundred breweries.
And it's a connoisseur event. People pay for a ticket, get a small tasting glass, and walk around sampling one-ounce pours from breweries competing for medals. The judging is rigorous. It's a trade show, a competition, and a pilgrimage, all at once. It's the modern, commercial, optional, branded version of the thing.
The pilgrimage part is real, though. People fly to Denver from all over the country. They plan their year around it. They collect the tasting glass, the program, the memories. It's a secular pilgrimage to the temple of craft beer.
And that's the key. The form is commercial, but the function is not so different from the Festival of Drunkenness. People are seeking a bounded, intense, communal experience. They're just doing it with tasting notes instead of temple drums.
Now the ancient Mesopotamian akitu festival. Twelve days at the Babylonian New Year. Drinking, role reversals, the king being ritually humiliated before the god Marduk.
The king would be stripped of his regalia, slapped in the face by the high priest, and made to kneel and declare that he had not sinned against the city. Then the statue of Marduk was paraded through the streets, and the whole population drank and celebrated for twelve days. The role reversal was structural. The king was brought low, the god was elevated, and the social order was temporarily suspended.
And the drinking was part of the suspension. When the king is on his knees and the beer is flowing, the normal rules don't apply. That's the mechanism.
The Greek Anthesteria does the same thing in three days. It was a wine festival in Athens honoring Dionysus, held in the month of Anthesterion, roughly February. The first day was the opening of the wine jars, the pithoi. The second day was the Choes, the drinking contest, where everyone drank from their own individual pitcher. The third day was the Chytroi, the pots, which was about the dead. And on the second day, slaves drank with their masters. Social hierarchy was suspended for one day.
Slaves drinking with masters. That's the safety valve. You let the pressure out once a year, and the rest of the year the hierarchy stays intact.
And the Romans did the same with the Bacchanalia, except it got out of hand. Originally secret rites for women honoring Bacchus, the Roman Dionysus. They became mixed-gender, frequent, and increasingly wild. The Roman Senate suppressed them in 186 BCE, and the decree is one of the most famous inscriptions we have. The Senate's complaint was that the Bacchanalia were creating a conspiracy, a state within a state. Too much drinking, too much secrecy, too much social mixing.
So the Senate's answer was to ban it. Which is the Roman solution to everything. Can't manage the festival, kill the festival.
And it mostly worked, for a while. But the impulse didn't go away. It just moved.
Now the modern examples beyond Oktoberfest. The Czech Pilsner Fest, which celebrates the birth of pilsner beer in 1842 in Plzeň.
Pilsner Urquell was first brewed in October of 1842, and the festival in Plzeň is a direct celebration of that moment. It's smaller than Oktoberfest, more focused on the beer itself, and it has the advantage of being in the town where the style was actually born. The Czechs drink more beer per capita than anyone else on Earth, so the festival is a civic event in the same way Oktoberfest is.
The Belgian Beer Weekend in Brussels is the connoisseur's version. Trappist ales, lambics, saisons. A much more cerebral drinking culture.
Belgium has over fifteen hundred original beers, and the festival in the Grand-Place is a showcase of that diversity. It's less about mass drinking and more about tasting, which is a very Belgian approach. The beer is treated like wine.
And the Australian GABS, the Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular, which is the craft beer innovation festival. Breweries make one-off experimental beers specifically for the event.
That's the one where you get beers brewed with weird ingredients, strange processes, beers that only exist for that one weekend. It's the opposite of Oktoberfest's six-brewery cartel. It's total creative chaos, and it's become a major event in the Southern Hemisphere.
So that's the survey. Ten festivals, ancient and modern, and the range is enormous. From temple courtyards in Egypt to a shopping mall in Denver.
But here's the thing. When you lay them out like this, the differences are obvious, but the underlying structure is the same. A bounded period of time. Normal labor suspended. Communal intoxication as the primary activity. Some kind of cover story, religious or civic or commercial.
The cover story is the part that changed most. Ancient festivals had religious mandates. The Egyptian festival was commanded by the temple. The akitu was commanded by the state. The Anthesteria was part of the civic calendar. You didn't choose to participate. You were part of it.
And modern festivals are optional. You buy a ticket. You choose to go. Nobody in Munich is required to attend Oktoberfest. Nobody in Denver is required to attend the Great American Beer Festival. The obligation has been replaced by consumer choice.
That's the scale axis, too. Ancient festivals were limited by population and geography. A few thousand people at most, in a single city. Oktoberfest draws six million from around the world. The Great American Beer Festival draws tens of thousands of ticketed attendees. The scale has jumped by orders of magnitude.
And the purpose has shifted. Ancient festivals reinforced social order, either by affirming it or by temporarily inverting it. The akitu humiliated the king, but the point was to reaffirm the king's legitimacy. The Anthesteria let slaves drink with masters, but the point was to release pressure so the hierarchy could continue. The modern festivals don't invert anything. They reinforce consumer identity and brand loyalty.
The inversion mechanism is the most interesting part. Saturnalia, which we didn't even get to, had slaves being served by their masters. The akitu had the king on his knees. The Anthesteria had slaves drinking with masters. These were deliberate, structured suspensions of hierarchy.
And they served a safety-valve function. The anthropologist Victor Turner called these liminal periods, where normal structure is dissolved and then re-established. The dissolution is temporary, bounded, and the re-establishment is the point. You let people experience the opposite of the normal order for a few days, and they go back to the normal order with less resentment.
Modern festivals don't do this. There's no role reversal at Oktoberfest. The hierarchy is the same as the rest of the year, just with more beer. The breweries are still in charge. The ticket holders are still consumers. The only inversion is that people wear lederhosen, which is not exactly revolutionary.
The economics are the other big shift. Oktoberfest generates over one billion euros for Munich's economy. Hotels, restaurants, taxis, the breweries, the fairground operators. The Great American Beer Festival drives significant tourism to Denver. San Fermín is a major economic engine for Pamplona. These are commercial enterprises, and they're run as such.
Ancient festivals were also economic, but the mechanism was different. The temple or the state sponsored the festival. The elite provided the food and drink as patronage. The pharaoh or the king or the temple priesthood was distributing resources, and that distribution was part of the political order.
That's a misconception worth busting. The idea that ancient festivals were pure and spiritual while modern ones are commercial. The Egyptian temple controlled the beer supply. The Mesopotamian state controlled the grain. The festivals were also economic tools, ways of distributing resources and maintaining social order. The difference is that the ancient version was patronage, and the modern version is ticketing.
Patronage versus ticketing. The elite paying for the festival versus the attendees paying for the festival. That's the shift in a nutshell.
The activities have changed. Ancient festivals often involved ritualized drinking to the point of unconsciousness or altered states as a form of divine communication. The Festival of Drunkenness is the clearest example, but the Anthesteria's drinking contest and the Bacchanalia's ecstatic rites were similar. The goal was to reach a state where the normal self was dissolved and something else could speak.
Modern festivals emphasize consumption, spectacle, and social media documentation. The goal is to have a good time, take pictures, and post them. The altered state is optional, and it's not framed as divine communication. It's framed as fun.
San Fermín is the exception. The risk ritual is still there. The possibility of death is real. And that's what gives it the sacred dimension that the other modern festivals lack. People don't go to the Great American Beer Festival to risk their lives. They go to taste beer. But people go to San Fermín to run in front of bulls, and that risk is what makes it meaningful.
The risk is the ritual. That's the second-order insight. When you remove the risk, you remove the sacred dimension, and you're left with consumption.
The globalization of drinking festivals creates a tension between authenticity and commodification. Oktoberfest celebrations now happen in Brazil, China, the United States. These are branded events, licensed or imitated, and they're often generic. The original civic meaning is lost, replaced by a template.
The template is the thing. A beer festival is now a recognizable format. Tents, steins, pretzels, oompah music. You can reproduce it anywhere, and people will recognize it. But the recognition is the brand, not the experience.
Holi has had to navigate this. The bhang tradition is increasingly sidelined in commercial celebrations. The color runs and the tourist versions emphasize the colors, the music, the spectacle, but the religious intoxication is often absent. The festival survives, but the meaning is diluted.
San Fermín has the opposite problem. The risk ritual is so compelling that it attracts global attention, but the global attention changes the nature of the event. The locals still run, but the festival is now also a tourist spectacle, and the two versions coexist uneasily.
The through-line is this. Drinking festivals are a human universal. Every civilization we have records for has created sanctioned blocks of time for communal intoxication. But the function has shifted from social cohesion and religious expression to economic development and individual consumption. The ancient impulse to suspend reality for a bounded period remains, but the institutional scaffolding has changed.
The scaffolding, not the impulse. That's the key. The impulse is the same. The scaffolding is different.
The scaffolding matters. It determines who's in charge, who benefits, what the festival means. The Egyptian temple meant one thing. The Munich brewery cartel means another. The Denver convention center means a third.
What happens when the scaffolding is purely commercial and globalized? Do we lose something essential?
I think we lose the inversion. The safety valve. The temporary suspension of hierarchy. A commercial festival doesn't suspend anything. It reinforces the existing order. You're still a consumer. You're just a consumer with a beer stein.
The religious festivals that survive, like Holi and San Fermín, are the ones that kept something dangerous or sacred at their core. The ones that became purely commercial lost the thing that made them compelling.
Craft beer and experiential tourism are growing, though. We may see more niche festivals that try to recreate the authentic communal experience. The question is whether authenticity can be manufactured.
I don't think it can. Authenticity is the thing that happens when nobody's trying to sell it to you.
The Bavarian wedding was not trying to be authentic. It just was. The Egyptian temple was not trying to be authentic. It just was. The moment you start curating the experience, you've lost the thing you're curating.
That's the open question, then. If the ancient festivals worked because they were embedded in religious and civic life, and the modern festivals work because they're commercial products, can you build a festival that does both?
I don't know. But I suspect the answer is that you can't build it. It has to grow. And the ones that grow are the ones that start from something real, like a wedding, or a myth, or a bull run, and then accumulate layers over centuries.
Centuries. That's the timescale. We're not going to see the next Oktoberfest in our lifetime. But we might see the seed of it.
Hilbert: The beer at that mall festival in Paramus was a low-alcohol malt beverage. Four hundred cases of it. I ordered it myself because the supplier said it was traditional Bavarian. It tasted like carbonated rye bread.
Four hundred cases. And the festival was a disaster, I assume.
Hilbert: We lost twelve thousand dollars. The mall had a fountain, and by the second day people were pouring the stuff into the fountain. The security guards didn't care. They were drinking it too.
That's a lot of rye bread.
Hilbert: It's not just the modern festivals that are commercial, though. That's the thing. The ancient ones were economic too. The temple priests controlled the beer supply in Egypt. The state used the festivals to distribute grain and keep people quiet. It's always been about money and control. The only difference is now we call it branding.
That's the point we were making, but you're putting it more bluntly. The patronage system was economic. It just wasn't called commerce.
Hilbert: My cousin ran the beer tent at a church Oktoberfest in a parking lot in Clifton. Made more money in one weekend than she did all year as a dental hygienist. The church got a cut. The beer distributor got a cut. Everyone was happy. That's not branding. That's just business.
The commercialization isn't new. It's just more visible.
Hilbert: I still have a case of that malt beverage in the garage. I use it to kill slugs. Pour a little on the ground and they come up and drink it and then they die. The slugs in New Jersey are the size of small dogs.
That's a very specific pest control method.
Hilbert: It works. The stuff is forty years old and it still kills them. I don't know what that says about the beer or the slugs.
It says the beer was never meant for human consumption, and the slugs don't know any better.
Hilbert: The point is, the festival was a disaster because nobody wanted to drink carbonated rye bread. But the impulse was there. People came. They wanted the communal thing. They just wanted it with beer that didn't taste like a bakery.
The impulse is the universal. The execution is the variable.
Hilbert: The execution matters. Four hundred cases of bad beer will kill a festival faster than any Senate decree.
The Senate killed the Bacchanalia with a decree. You killed the Paramus festival with bad beer. Different tools, same result.
Hilbert: The decree was probably cheaper.
That's a fair point. The Senate didn't have to eat twelve thousand dollars.
Hilbert: No, they just killed people. Different approach.
The Roman approach to festival management was not subtle.
Hilbert: Neither is carbonated rye bread.
If the impulse is universal and the execution is the variable, then the question is what execution actually works. And the answer seems to be that it has to be embedded in something real. A wedding, a myth, a bull run, a city's identity.
Not a shopping mall in Paramus.
Hilbert: The mall had a fountain. That was the only good part.
A fountain full of malt beverage and dead slugs. That's the modern drinking festival in miniature.
I think that's the image we're going to end on, whether we want to or not.
The open question is whether the globalized, commercialized version of these festivals can ever produce the social cohesion the ancient ones did. Or whether we're just selling tickets to an increasingly hollow experience.
The counter-question is whether the hollow experience is still better than nothing. People still go. They still drink together. They still have the communal moment, even if it's branded.
Maybe the branding is just the new scaffolding. And the scaffolding doesn't matter as much as we think. The impulse is still there, and it still works, even when the beer tastes like rye bread.
Except when it doesn't work. Twelve thousand dollars of it doesn't work.
But the slugs were happy.
The slugs were a case study in unintended consequences.
If you enjoyed this tour of epic drinking festivals, leave a review and tell a friend. It helps more than you'd think.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, who has now given us the definitive image of the modern drinking festival: a shopping mall fountain full of carbonated rye bread and dead slugs.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Stay thirsty, stay curious, and we'll see you soon.
