Prostly Issue #9: The Festival Issue

Welcome beer drinkers from far and wide to the latest edition of Prostly, a magazine that fuses our two greatest loves – beer and travel. As the title of our ninth issue implies, we’re focused on beer festivals this month – and more specifically German beer festivals – which you could say is our third love.

We created Prostly as a platform to highlight beer around the world, from its unique cultural legacies to its constantly-evolving trends, and to share stories of the beers, brewers and bars that operate on both ends of the spectrum.

Having a job that involves traveling to beer destinations, and destinations with beer, is tremendous. Witnessing first hand how the industry is changing, seeing how passionate people producing beer that they love are shifting the balance of power is thrilling. Though what has inevitably followed are subjective beer ratings, questions of brewers’ legitimacies, and an all too often judgemental tone of what’s worthy and what’s not.

At the tail end of the German beer festival season, I’m reminded of the simple pleasure of enjoying beer in a setting that’s so strongly tethered to a culture. Where residents, who look forward to the festivities all year, are so happy to be celebrating over a litre of beer that their joyfulness is contagious. Everyone’s drinking the same beers, which they all hold in high regard. That’s the beauty of the German beer festival.

Oktoberfest may be the most famous beer festival in the world, but Germany boasts dozens of other great beer festivals throughout the year. Our 2018 German Beer Festival Guide highlights several other notable beerfests that merit a visit. From ultra local gatherings to massive events, its a safe bet that there’s a beer festival taking place somewhere in Germany at any given time of the year – and with our latest guide, we’ve taken the work out of hunting them down.

If you’re still inclined to make the pilgrimage to Oktoberfest after reading our 2018 German Beer Festival Guide, we’ve also got you covered. After years of partaking in the annual festivities, we’ve published a photographic guide to Oktoberfest. We braved tent after tent with our camera gear, narrowly escaping splashes of beer from overzealous cheers-ing, and interviewed tent owners and local revellers to give you the lowdown. You can also check out a bunch of in depth articles from last year’s Oktoberfest on our sister site Departful.

We cap off our coverage this month focusing on another German beer festival: Stuttgart’s Cannstatter Volksfest. Two hours from Munich, this event takes place around the same time as Oktoberfest and is nearly the same size and scale – it’s actually the second largest beer festival in the world! Though sharing many similarities with Oktoberfest, the Cannstatter Volksfest is unique in many ways – and is a crazy party.

That’s it for this month. We’ll be back in November with more beer content from our amazing beer loving community.

Prost!