Friday 5pm – Lime debts

Friday 5pm

Jonny recounts his recent trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, detailing the atmosphere, costs, and cultural nuances of the festival. The episode

Key takeaways

• Oktoberfest beer prices are fixed across all tents, costing approximately €15.80 per mass.
• The Cask Seminar highlighted a shift toward emotional and nostalgic branding to engage 35-55 and 18-35 year olds.

Main topics

• Oktoberfest experiences
• Cask Ale industry trends

Notable quotes

It's all about emotional plays. It's nostalgia.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep dive into the cultural and commercial evol

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hello, Brad here, just to say we're super proud that the Friday 5pm podcast is sponsored by The Malt Miller, the UK's best home brew store. We Speaker 1 (0:08) use The Malt Miller for all of our homebrew experiments, as well as tapping them up for advice and binging on their awesome YouTube channel all the time. Speaker 2 (0:15) That's why whenever we release a homebrew video, we put a recipe kit live on The Malt Miller, so you can brew with the exact same amazing ingredients that we did. The same ingredients used by pro brewers. Speaker 1 (0:27) So alongside the Malt Miller's nitro-flushed hops, cold-stored yeast and mill-to-order malts, you can pick up recipe kits for our Five Points Best Bitter, Russian River West Coast IPA and now the fastest beer in the world, a hazy session IPA that goes from grain to glass in less than 48 hours. Sign up to their newsletter Speaker 2 (0:44) at tinyurl.com forward slash maltmiller to get 5 % off your first order. With the Malt Miller's amazing customer service and Johnny's 48-hour recipe, You could order the ingredients on a Monday and be drinking the beer by the weekend. Speaker 1 (0:59) Speaking of which, it's Friday. It's 5pm. So enjoy this week's Friday 5pm podcast. It's Friday, it's 5pm and Bradley, I survived two near-death experiences this week. Wow, tell us more, Jonny. Well, the first one was Oktoberfest. 12 hours on the Wiesen. Five steins, five litres of beer. Speaker 1 (1:32) And the other near-death experience was falling asleep at this year's cask seminar, which I always think is going to be a risk. But actually, the last two years, as we'll get into, have been much more exciting than the first two or three I went to. Speaker 2 (1:46) You'll Speaker 1 (1:47) count Speaker 2 (1:47) in five beers, five small beers, as a near-death experience. Seems a bit dramatic. Speaker 2 (1:55) Five, five, it's ten pints, mate. Nearly. Well, they're a bit weak though, aren't they, really? They had to weak them down, you know. Six percent. Speaker 1 (2:02) Do you know, in the comments of the reel I made, somebody was like, they watered them down. And I was like, imagine if that was true. Like the international scandal, the millions of pounds of theft that these brews would be accused of. Maybe I'll take my Anton Parr next time I go just to prove it. But I was like, these beers are not watered down. If they were, then I'd have done a slightly better job on my reel, I reckon. Because I say these beers traditionally were brewed in March, drunk in September, and lagered over the winter. And I could see that meme of Zach Gnifankis with the... Speaker 2 (2:42) Clogs. Clogs are turning. Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:44) And everyone going, wait, no, he means summer, right? He must mean summer. And viewer I did mean summer. That's Speaker 2 (2:53) acceptable after 10 pints in, you know? Well, at that point I was Speaker 1 (2:58) two in, I Speaker 2 (2:59) think. Speaker 1 (2:59) I Speaker 2 (2:59) was four, Speaker 1 (3:00) well, four pints. Four pints in. Four pints in Speaker 2 (3:02) is still pretty strong, to be fair. Speaker 1 (3:04) It felt like it, you know? It's a really weird way to spend a day. I mean, I think the tents open at 9am on a standard day. So God knows what that feels like, being four pints deep by, you know, half ten. But it was very odd to have your first beer before lunch. And by the time you got up from your seat, you'd done more drinking than I would do on an evening with friends. Yeah. It is a lot. I'm not going Speaker 2 (3:32) to lie. So I've never been, which is really sad. I really want to go. Speaker 2 (3:40) Is it on every single day for the month of September once it's opened? Speaker 1 (3:45) No, no, no, no. Well, yeah, so it opened, what was it, the 19th of September this year, and it will go on until the first Sunday of October. And it's open from 9 till basically midnight. yeah every day so 15 hours of potential drinking yeah Speaker 2 (4:05) i uh i even looked because i wanted to book a last minute holiday next week because i had a holiday this year and i wanted to just see if if there's any way of going there because i was really gutted i didn't go with you and um i looked so bloody expensive i thought oh i found something might maybe reasonable for like a couple of days it's like midweek And when I click through on lastminute.com, it was like staying in a campsite. Most all of the cheap ones were these weird campsites. They've obviously set up near Munich. I presume near Munich somewhere where they're just thousands of presumably Australians, 20 year old Australians, absolute booze hounds, just making an absolute ruckus. I'm presuming. I mean, I Speaker 1 (4:57) would Speaker 2 (4:57) say that. I'm not sure who else Speaker 1 (4:58) they're catering for. Speaker 2 (5:00) I Speaker 1 (5:01) mean, yeah, it's Australian and British tourists, I'm fairly certain. Speaker 2 (5:04) Presumably they're not like family friendly or anything. They were still expensive. They were like 500 quid for a frigging campsite for like a few days. For how long? I can't remember. It was like a few days, like three or four days. Speaker 2 (5:18) I mean, Speaker 1 (5:20) the reason I didn't ask you to come is because it's cost me. I'm going for book research and I had to go for the opening weekend. And for me to be there for two nights cost me, and I thought this was cheap, 550 quid. Oh, okay. And I was in a hotel that was about a 15-minute tram ride out of the centre. So I think I got quite lucky, essentially. Shout out to the Leonardo in Olympia Park. They were charging, it was 120 quid a night. It wasn't that bad. It was the flights that were ridiculous. I think it was 280 quid for the flights when you go at the right time to Munich, you'll pay 40 quid. Speaker 1 (6:03) So, yeah, I mean, it's big business, like the tents and the camping kind of element of it. And I think it's mostly people that aren't. I mean, at my age, you know, I went and I saw all the cultural sites as well and had a lovely, relatively restrained time. But I met, so on the first night I went and I met Johannes, who's a radiologist and a beer sommelier, and he's called The Beer Doctor. And he's sort of a blogger and Instagrammer and he does tastings at the Four Seasons Hotel. Couldn't afford to stay there. Speaker 1 (6:38) And we went for a couple of beers at Hofbräuhaus on the Friday night. And Hofbräuhaus is essentially Oktoberfest all year round. It's massively rammed the whole time. You sit on big sharing tables. And we went there last time we went to Munich. Yeah, that's great. And we sat down next to a stag do. But clearly a second marriage stag do. Sort of 45 to 55-year-old kind of gents. And they... Speaker 1 (7:07) they'd got very, very drunk the night before, as you all do on the first night. You go too hard. And they were hanging, but they were still drinking, and they bought us Jägermeisters, which I wasn't thrilled about, but I drank it. And at the end of the night, we said our goodbyes and said, enjoy Oktoberfest. And I bumped into them at the airport on the way home, and one of the guys recognised me and came over and he said, How was your weekend? I was like, yeah, it was great. Got all the research I needed to do and this kind of stuff. And he said, we never made it to Oktoberfest. Oh, wow. So they'd gone so hard the first two nights that none of them, none of them had the stomach for another day's drinking. Wow. So you Speaker 2 (7:52) don't have to buy tickets to get into Oktoberfest, right? You just sort of rock up. But you have to queue. Speaker 1 (7:57) No, I mean, you can book tables if you're months and months and months and months in advance. And you pay in advance for that. But otherwise, it's, you Speaker 2 (8:03) know, race for a table. Presumably those guys were just going to, they would have had to get up early in the morning to maybe get a table somewhere. Speaker 1 (8:10) Yeah, I mean, if Speaker 2 (8:11) you're on a peak Speaker 1 (8:11) table and you want to be there for the tapping, which happens at midday on the first day, people start queuing at five or six in the morning. Okay. I Speaker 2 (8:21) mean, look, I don't think that's unreasonable. Like when we think about... things that we'll do if we really like if we're really into like people that queue up for maybe gta6 when it comes out and they might be waiting for like a week or something in a queue getting up a bit early to go to like the biggest sort of bestest beer celebration maybe on the planet it Speaker 1 (8:44) only happens on the first two days that's like you know by almost by the monday you can waltz in at 11. and get a table. And even, so I found, I put it in the reel, like if you go into the Ouida, which is, it's like a, like a local dialect for, it should be Alta's Wiesen, like old, old Wiesen. If you go in there, it was Saturday night. It was about 8pm on the first day of Oktoberfest and the tent where you have to pay four euros to get into, hundreds of seats spare. Speaker 2 (9:22) Yeah, you said that. Speaker 1 (9:23) It is about playing the game right. Speaker 2 (9:26) Right, right. How much is a mass when you're there? Speaker 1 (9:30) Are Speaker 2 (9:30) they different Speaker 1 (9:30) prizes? No, they're all... It's a cabal. It's a cabal. It's completely price fixed. They all charge the same. They all offer virtually the same menu. It's £15.80 for a mass. Okay. So, eight... euros a pint or just just just under a pint so you know about 657 quid a pint and it's not cheap but it's six percent well Speaker 2 (10:01) yeah i mean that doesn't sound too bad for the atmosphere you'll get in there that's pretty good i think uh giant pretzels how much is giant pretzel i think Speaker 1 (10:11) there were seven euros for a massive one okay Speaker 2 (10:13) i'm trying to think what they were i mean they're they're ginormous Right, okay. So it's all right. I feel Speaker 1 (10:19) like... It's a sharing Speaker 2 (10:20) pretzel. They're not rip-off merchants like we would be if it was in the UK. If this was a festival over here, you'd get absolutely screwed for buying beer and stuff. But the Speaker 1 (10:34) Germans, that seems pretty fair, I think. It's all relative, though, because if you're just in town and you ordered a mass... it would be not half that price it might be like 10 10 euros maybe so i mean there is a definite premium but if you look at what goes into oktoberfest the the amount of staff security building work you know musicians playing for 15 hours a day yeah yeah Speaker 1 (11:04) you know, it costs a lot to put that on. I don't think they're necessarily really creaming off at the top. I think it's just the reality of the modern world and what it takes to put an event of that scale on. And I'm sure they do brilliantly out of it. It was interesting. So I was interviewing lots of different people from different breweries. So I interviewed the brewmaster at Hackershaw, head of PR at Hofbräuhaus, and... Speaker 1 (11:29) Others? Oh my God. Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:31) some of the others. Speaker 1 (11:32) Some of them were really cagey about talking about volumes and profits and things. I don't think they want people to know, A, because I think they don't want to be seen as, you know, cashing in. But I also think that within the breweries, they're a bit, I feel like they'd fall out if they knew exactly how well everyone was doing, potentially. Speaker 1 (11:53) So it is kind of hushed up a little bit. But the Hofbräuhaus guy was just like, I'll tell you. What's the issue? So I think he was saying, I think it's about 1.5 % of Hofbräuhaus' entire volume is done in those two weeks on that site. Which, you know, 1.5%, that's not a lot. But for two weeks in one location is mad. Speaker 2 (12:23) Yeah, that does sound quite mad, but also not that impressive. 1.5 % doesn't sound insane. Yeah, not as Speaker 1 (12:30) much as I thought it would be. I thought it would be more. But then, I mean, the Hofbrauhaus is the smallest of the big six. Right, yeah, yeah. So it'll be an even bigger proportion because I think they all sell similar amounts of beer. Maybe Augustina sell a little bit more because they seem to have more tents. I think they've got three. Speaker 2 (12:52) I think everybody Speaker 1 (12:52) else has two, Speaker 2 (12:55) maybe. Speaker 1 (12:56) My next Speaker 2 (12:57) question is, are they operating like a sort of beer stamp passport system where you stamp the different tents you've been into? Because that seems like an obvious tourist trap sort of thing that might be fun. Speaker 1 (13:10) No, Speaker 2 (13:11) not that I was aware of. Those coin machines where you put a euro in and it squidges it out and it says Speaker 1 (13:17) Augustina on it. That'd be great. Speaker 2 (13:19) I'd Speaker 1 (13:19) get all of them. I mean, they go hard on the merch. I would say Hofbury House was the most on it with the merchandise. There were people walking around with big sticks that had T-shirts dangling from them and stuff and finding drunk people to say, hey, you want this T-shirt? There was quite a good Christmas jumper that I was a little bit tempted by. So, no, because I was in a very privileged position in that I had essentially a seat in whatever tent. I wanted to go into because I was interviewing people. And Hofbrauhaus very kindly got me a seat afterwards when I met with a friend. But moving around the tents can be a bit tricky. If it's not during the day on a Tuesday, generally all of the seats are taken or most of the seats are taken. So you could only do a couple of tents. And you couldn't do all of the tents either because there's too many for a human to drink. Speaker 1 (14:15) it's a uh oh god i don't know how many tents actually but it yeah there's no sort of encouraging what was quite interesting is other than the i'm pros it which they sing every 15 20 minutes or something