Last weekend, the annual Oktoberfest beer festival started in Munich (Bavaria, Germany).
It traditionally began on the third Saturday of September at 11:00 local time. The event was opened by the Mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, by hammering a tap into a barrel of freshly brewed beer. The first cup was drunk by the Prime Minister of Bavaria, Markus Zeder.
Last year, 7.2 million people attended the festival. They drank 6.5 million liter mugs of beer, 200,000 of them non—alcoholic.
For the first time, Oktoberfest was held in Munich in 1810, when the wedding of Prince Ludwig I (the future King of Bavaria) and Princess Theresa of Saxony was celebrated. Then mass celebrations with free beer and horse racing were organized for the residents of the city. Since then, the tradition of holding a beer festival has been interrupted only during the cholera epidemic and world wars.
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