The Bierhalle is a traditional Munich institution, offering food, entertainment, and, of course, beer.
The Bavarian Brew -- Few cities in the world cling to a beverage the way Munich clings to beer. Münchners -- with a little help from their visitors -- consume a world's record of the stuff: 280 liters a year, per capita (as opposed to a wimpy 150 liters in other parts of Germany). This kind of "heroism" usually prompts a cynical comment from the wine drinkers of Berlin and the Rhineland -- they say that Bavarians never open their mouths except to pour in more beer! The Münchner response is that settling questions of politics, art, music, commerce, and finance, as well as the affairs of the human heart, requires plenty of beer and lots of good, unfussy food.
Some of Munich's most notable events have floated on the suds. There was Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch (Hofbräuhaus, 1923); a bungled attempt to assassinate Hitler (in the Bürgerbräukeller, 1939); and, most recently, the Beer Garden Revolution, a 1995 event, when the proposed closing of a neighborhood beer garden at 9:30pm was seen as a threat to the civil liberties of all the city's beer drinkers and prompted mass rallies by infuriated Münchners. These, along with dozens of smaller but still sudsy tempests, have trained Munich's politicians to view the effects of the brew on their constituents with considerable respect.
Statistics regarding Oktoberfest are daunting indeed -- 7 million visitors flood into the city for 2 drink-sodden weeks, surging into every beer hall in town and filling the sprawling network of tents set up in the Theresienwiese for the event. But while the festival promotes the consumption of millions of liters of beer, beer drinking continues on (almost as heartily) year-round. Under the trees of the beer gardens in summer and in the noisy beer halls and cellars, solid citizens in feathered hats, Schicki-Mickies (club-going Bavarian yuppies), grandmothers, students, and tourists rub shoulders as they down their hefty liter mugs of beer. And as you drink, it's a tradition to complain about anything and everything. Linguists have even coined a word for the local habit of mumbling into a stein of beer -- guanteln. And why not? It's a therapeutic, relatively inexpensive way to let off steam.
The perfect accompaniment for beer (especially if it happens to be consumed before noon), as everyone knows, is Weisswurst, those little white sausages. And every year, the anniversary of their invention, in 1857, is celebrated as something of a national holiday. Prost! (Toast!)
