Rockoly’s Oktoberfest

Oktoberfest is the world's largest Volksfest, held every year on the same meadow in Munich. It began as a wedding party. On October 12, 1810, Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate on the fields outside the city gates. The horse race that closed the festivities was popular enough to repeat the following year, and it has been running ever since.

Those fields are still the site, and they still carry her name: Theresienwiese, Therese's meadow. Munich locals just call it the Wiesn.

The festival now runs 16 to 18 days, starting in the second half of September and ending on the first weekend of October, for the straightforward reason that September evenings in Bavaria are warmer. The name stayed even though most of it no longer happens in October.

Three things, and Munich is strict about all of them:

1. It has to be brewed inside Munich's city limits. Nothing from outside the city is poured in the festival tents.
2. It has to follow the Reinheitsgebot, the Bavarian purity law of 1516, which permitted only water, barley and hops. Yeast joined the list centuries later, once anyone knew it existed.
3. It has to come from one of the six Munich breweries that hold festival rights.

Those six are Augustiner-Bräu, Hacker-Pschorr-Bräu, Löwenbräu, Paulaner-Bräu, Spatenbräu and Staatliches Hofbräu-München.

The traditional style is Märzen, a malty amber lager with a clean, dry finish, and even its name is a leftover from Bavarian law. Brewing through the summer was banned for centuries because it was too warm to do safely, so brewers made a stronger batch in March, lagered it in cold cellars all summer, and drank down what was left in the autumn. An autumn festival and a beer built to survive until autumn were made for each other.

Here's the twist most beer lists get wrong: what the Munich tents actually pour today is mostly Festbier, a paler golden lager of the same strength that Paulaner introduced in the early 1970s and that had taken over the Wiesn by around 1990. Märzen is still what the rest of the world means by an Oktoberfest beer. Breweries everywhere make one now, and Munich simply doesn't count them.

Three Bavarian menus, each led live by a chef:

• Bavarian Pretzels with Pub Cheese, 60 minutes. Soft, chewy and salted, with creamy pub cheese for dipping. Add a tasting of three German beers: a Hefeweizen, a stout and an amber.
• German Schnitzel with sweet and sour cabbage, 60 minutes. Add fresh spaetzle made from scratch for another 30 minutes, or the beer tasting, or both.
• Apple Strudel with vanilla glaze, 90 minutes. A sweet homemade apple filling wrapped in pastry and baked. Add a coffee tasting of roasts from small farms around the world.

All three have gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan versions.

Lye. Before it's baked, a proper Bavarian pretzel is dipped in a food-grade alkaline solution, and that's what turns the crust deep mahogany and gives it the faint mineral tang you can't fake with an egg wash. The alkali speeds up the browning reactions between sugars and proteins that would otherwise take much longer in the oven, which is why the outside goes glossy and dark while the inside stays pale and soft.

Home kitchens usually swap in a baking soda bath, which is far safer to handle and gets you most of the way there. It's the kind of detail you only really learn while shaping the dough, which is more or less the argument for the whole workshop.

Bavaria has rules about all of this, and a few of them are strange:

• Weisswurst, the white veal and pork sausage, is traditionally eaten before noon, and the skin is never eaten. You either peel it or cut a slit and suck the meat out.
• Radi is a plate of thinly spiraled salted radish, taken as seriously as anything else on the table because it is exactly what a large beer wants.
• Steckerlfisch is whole fish grilled upright on a stick, a surprising sight at a festival otherwise built on pork.
• Leberkäse translates as liver cheese and usually contains neither liver nor cheese. It's a fine-textured meatloaf, normally served hot in a roll.
• The Ochsenbraterei tent roasts whole oxen on a spit, and the individual animals are picked and put on show rather than quietly turning up on a plate.
• Festival pretzels are enormous, big enough that first-time visitors photograph them before eating them.

Our menus stick to the crowd-pleasers. The chef will happily tell you about the rest while your dough rests.

Yes it will. The chef teaches every step live, ingredients arrive portioned, and both pretzels and schnitzel are forgiving. Shaping the dough badly is half the fun, and schnitzel is three bowls and a pan.

As for the theme: a happy hour is a video call where people hold drinks. An Oktoberfest workshop gives the hour a shape. Everyone is shaping pretzel dough or breading schnitzel at the same time, the chef explains what they're doing and why, and there's a beer tasting at the end if you want one. Nobody needs a briefing on Oktoberfest, and the food is built for sharing, so the people who joined with their camera off tend not to stay that way. Family and partners can join on the same screen at no extra cost, which suits a festival built around long shared tables.

Groups run from 3 to 600 or more, with very large teams split by department or across days. Zoom is the default, and Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and WebEx all work. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher and no-alcohol versions cost nothing extra when we know in advance. Kits ship free within the US, and we deliver internationally to Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Sweden and Spain among others, or your team can work from a shopping list.

It does, because the beer was never the main event here. All three menus on this page are food — pretzels with pub cheese, schnitzel, apple strudel — and the beer tasting is a thirty-minute add-on you simply don't order.

Nothing else changes. No-alcohol versions cost nothing extra when you tell us in advance, customization is free, and the Apple Strudel menu offers a coffee tasting instead, roasts from small farms around the world, which suits strudel better than a Märzen would anyway.

It's also truer to the original than a beer-only event would be. Oktoberfest is a Volksfest: a public fair with fairground rides, brass bands and food stalls, and plenty of people go for the roast chicken, the pretzels and the rides as much as for the beer.

Apple Strudel is $795 for a group under 5, then $159 per person from 5 to 30, $149 from 31 to 50 and $139 above that. Pretzels with Pub Cheese runs $745, then $149, $139 and $129. German Schnitzel is $695, then $139, $129 and $119. Each rate covers your personal chef, a dedicated event planner, ingredient delivery, gratuities and all service fees.

Munich's own festival runs from the second half of September to the first weekend of October, which gives you a genuinely wide window rather than a single date to fight over — and teams who miss it entirely book Oktoberfest menus in November without anyone objecting. Three weeks of lead time is the number for a cooking event, and rush dates are sometimes possible depending on chef availability.

A $250 deposit holds the date, and you can pay by credit card, ACH bank transfer or check. Cancel 21 or more days out and you are refunded what you paid less any nonrecoverable costs already committed; 8 to 20 days out you choose between a 50% refund and a 100% Rockoly credit; inside 8 days payments are nonrefundable, though one complimentary reschedule is yours if you ask 14+ days ahead. Every event is backed by the Love Your Event Guarantee: your team should have an amazing experience, and if your Rockoly event doesn't live up to expectations, we'll make it right. Fill out the form on this page and a planner will get back to you, or call (617) 939-9732 or email events@rockoly.com.