From flickr user **Mary**

It’s officially fall, and while we’ve talked plenty about Oktoberfest the past two weeks, we haven’t talked much about my personal favorite part of fall: pumpkin beer.

Foodie blog Slashfood looked at what they thought were the best pumpkin beers of this fall, and came up with a reasonable list.  Included on it:

• New Holland Ichabod
• Rock Art Imperial Spruce Stout
• Southern Tier Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale
• Cape Ann Fisherman’s Pumpkin Stout
• Midnight Sun T.R.E.A.T.
• Shipyard Pumpkinhead Ale
• Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale
• Dogfish Head Punkin Ale
• Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
• Samuel Adams Harvest Pumpkin

The Washington Post also wrote up their own take on six pumpkin beers to try this fall:

For fans of pumpkin beer, it’s the spices (most frequently cinnamon and nutmeg) that remind them of mom’s homemade pies and set their mouths watering. Pumpkin adds some fermentable material to the beer and maybe a little mouthfeel and sweetness, but not much else.

I’ve always found spiced beers interesting to taste but a bit too cloying to buy by the sixpack. Fritz Hahn, the Post’s bars and clubs editor, came to my rescue by inviting me to a blind tasting of six pumpkin beers on the Post’s rooftop garden last Thursday.

I’ve been buying up as much pumpkin beer as I can find.  Pumpkin beers unfortunately come at the end of the light summer beer seasonals and then go away too quickly for the winter and Christmas ales that follow.

Oktoberfest food

Foodie blog SeriousEats takes a look at the food of Oktoberfest.  After all, you aren’t going to be able to try much if you’re drinking on an empty stomach.

Today, it is less about royalty and more about, let’s face it, beer.  But even the hardiest German or most experienced fest tourist will need something to go with the specially brewed (and slightly stronger) festival beer. So if you want to build a solid foundation in your stomach, or if you want to be prepared for when the inebriated cravings set it, here is a quick run-down of what is and what may not be worth eating at the Munich Oktoberfest.

They write about everything from the sweet, including the ubiquitous gingerbread hearts, to the savory, which includes astronomical amounts of roasted meat.

The Big Picture (Thomas Kienzle/AFP/Getty Images)

One of our all-time favorite non-beer blogs, Boston.com’s The Big Picture, pulled together some of the best images from Oktoberfest 2010.  Absolutely worth checking out.

From flickr user StrudelMonkey under a CC License

You may not be headed to Munich for Oktoberfest this year, but there’s still plenty to know about the world’s most popular and well-known beer drinking event.

German website The Local has put together a guide to Oktoberfest covering all the various bits and pieces that make it what it is.

Pride in the obscure traditions of Oktoberfest never seems to diminish: genuine joy breaks out when Munich’s mayor cracks open the first barrel and cries, “O’zapft is!” as the foam hisses into the first mug. Then there’s the Trachtenumzug, a seven-kilometre parade of 8,000 people in traditional folk dress. It’s a mad, ornate pageant of marching bands, hunting clubs, and liveried coaches, led by the dignitaries of Bavaria and Munich and the Münchner Kindl – a kind of Oktoberfest prom queen chosen from the city’s social scene for both her comeliness and her knowledge of Bavarian history.

It all makes Oktoberfest a Bavarian juggernaut unlikely to be stopped anytime soon. The festival’s statistics are consistently mindboggling. In 2007, 6.2 million people consumed 6.9 million litres of beer (a new record), over 140,000 pairs of sausages, and over half a million roast chickens.

They’ve broken their work down into the most important categories:

• The beer (obviously)
• The food
• The traditions
• And the main tents

Read the rest of this entry »

From J. S. Müller on flicke under a CC License

If you’ve ever been in a bar, you know the smell: that dead, earthy scent beer gives off as it becomes stale and dries up.

If you’re Munich and you’re hosting Oktoberfest, you’ve got a lot of spilled, stale beer, along with portable toilets and food scraps, and and a that means a lot of smell.  In the past, that smell was covered by cigarette smoke, but since Munich has passed a smoking ban, there’s concern about the smell overtaking the event.

But they have a plan: a smell-fighting super bacteria they can pour on the tent floors to eat the stench.

As Der Spiegel reports, three beer tent owners plan to pour a solution with special bacteria into the floorboards and aisles between tables and toilets. The bacteria, called “Elbomex,” is sold as a soil additive, the newspaper reports. Its manufacturer also promotes the bacteria’s ability to cover up foul smells found in wastewater treatment facilities, stables and compost piles, Der Spiegel says. All that remains is a faint scent of soil.

Ricky Steinberg, who owns the famous brewery Hofbräu, already tried it out and said it seems to work. Still, beer-tent owners are fearing the worst: “You hear from nightclub owners that the smell has gotten very bad,” Steinberg told Munich’s Merkur newspaper.

Other than Hofbräu, Oktoberfest organizers were keeping mum on which tents were using the bacteria. Apparently, festivalgoers will be able to smell for themselves.