Has it ever occurred to you that every time you walk into a supermarket, every other sign on the shelf says “Limited Offer”, “Must Buy”, “3 Day Special”, “While Stocks Last” or “Weekend Specials”? It’s a basic formula retailers have mastered to drive consumerism as has every young, budding David Copperfield has proven that coins can indeed come out from anyone’s ear.

While this may not have been the intentions of the originators of Oktoberfest, it sure has been fine way of chugging more beer down throats in a few weeks than any other time of the year. Every beer loving throat looks forward to this time of the year with eager anticipation because we all know that for just this “limited time only” we get to sample specially brewed Marzen which have been fermenting since March! At the Munich village alone, over 7 million litres of alcohol is consumed over a the 2 week celebration!

In Singapore, celebrations will never get to the epic proportions witnessed at Munich each year. With this in mind, plus the fact that it should be every beer lover’s mission to visit Munich, we decided to make 2009 the year of our Oktoberfest pilgrimage. We even got past convincing our wives that there was shopping and wine in Germany by mentioning fashionistas like Claudia Schiffer and Karl Lagerfeld. Unfortunately, the year’s financial crisis made us a little more prudent and we decided that our pilgrimage would have to wait another year.

Instead, we set out searching for the few microbreweries in Singapore that do make an admirable attempt to brew their own Oktoberfest beers. We started out at Brotzeit after the first practice session of the Formula One weekend. Brotzeit’s Oktoberfest Bier had come over from Paulaner Brauhaus and had a nice pale golden colour, not too hoppy but with a crisp finish. Apparently, this is actually flown in specially from Munich making this a much cheaper option than flying to Germany.

Air flown from Munich

About 15 hours later, we were at Brewerkz sampling their brewmaster’s Oktoberfest contribution. This was vastly different from what we had tried at Brotzeit the night before. Brewerkz’s brew was dark drown, full bodied, malty, almost like a dunkel. And it’s 6% alcohol! We would have had a picture of this except we have an annoying habit of not reminding each other to take a photo of the beer before we actually drink it.

Paulaner Brauhaus didn’t start serving their special brew till the first week of October. Why special? This year, their freshly brewed beer, made on premise, was made in the same way as what they had served at the Munchen festival. It was full bodied with a golden yellow colour with a hoppy malt flavour which was very delicious. They’ve made only 50hl of this, of which, we’ve consumed 2 litres in jugular fashion.

We’ve got one more brew to try and that’s of a fellow homebrewer who’s invited us over this Friday to break open his very own Oktoberfest beer. To be continued…