This is going to be my last Oktoberfest post for a while, I swear! But I got some good stuff: I stumbled upon Schmankerl Time Machine, a project of Digital Humanities Virtual Laboratory at Munich University from a few years ago to digitise historic restaurant menus from Munich, from 1855 until the 1980s, and make them available online. This of course also contains menus of some of the Oktoberfest tents, which also mentioned beer types, and I quickly wanted to list.

Bräu-Rosl lists all the Pschorr beers on their 1965 menu (Edel-Hell, Export-Dunkel, Märzen, Bock, Stern-Weiße, Animator, St. Hubertus, Pschorr-Malz-Bier), but I don’t think all of those were actually sold there. The menu does have two beer names at the very top, though, Bräurosl-Wiesn-Märzen and Pschorr-Edel-Hell, so I assume that’s what was actually served. Hacker-Pschorr (in 1965, Hacker and Pschorr hadn’t merged yet) nowadays still serve an Edel-Hell from wooden cask at some of their beer halls.

The menu the same year at Fischer Vroni contains lots of advertising , including one for Augustiner Brauerei, listing some of the beers: Export-Bier dunkel, Edelstoff hell, heller Augustiner-Bock, St. Augustin-Maximator, and Oktoberfest-Märzenbier. Augustiner was served at the Augustiner Festhalle and Fischer Vroni, but it’s not clear which exact beers. So this did not give us much insight beyond the general Augustiner portfolio at the time.

Hippodrom in turn had two beers on their menu: Spatenbräu helles Wiesenbier, and Spatenbräu Champagner Weißbier. The latter would nowadays be called Kristallweizen, but this was 1965, before PGI and PDO, around the time when French winemakers only started complaining about the misuse of what they thought exclusively described sparkling wine from the Champagne region.

Hofbräuhaus only started participating at Oktoberfest in 1955. Ten years later, they served two beers: helles Festbier and Wies’n Märzen.

Löwenbräu served two beers in 1961: Wies’n Märzen and Export hell. They also have a bold warning text on their menu that if your Maß was under-poured, you’re kindly asked to have it properly filled up to the line. I’m not sure that would have been exactly popular with the waitresses.

Ochsen Braterei in 1965 unfortunately only had the logos of two brands on their menu, Paulaner and Thomasbräu, but in reality both of them were brewed by the same brewery. So maybe they had beers of both brands? I can’t say for sure.

Winzerer Fähndl, also known as the Paulaner-Thomasbräu-Festhalle, made this a bit clearer: they at least mention concrete beers next to both brands’ logos, namely Paulaner Märzen and Thomasbräu Hell-Urtyp.

And that’s it. Far from all the breweries or tents at Oktoberfest at the time, but we still see a general trend: a lot of them served more than just one beer, quite often both a Märzen and a Helles Export or Festbier. In the case of Hippodrom, wheat beer was also served. All very different from Oktoberfest nowadays.