Oktoberfest 2018 - Roundup

The 2018 Beer Festival in Munich has closed its gates

It was not such a hard time as in earlier years for me - the Wiesn 2018 ended last night and everyone is booking boxes and tables for the event next year already. I was visiting the event not as often as in the previous year due to many factors such as new job, some trip out of Munich and simply no time and only a basic enthusiasm to visit the event of madness. This might also be directly linked to the fact you are getting older and it becomes harder each and every year to compete with the young wild generation.

My last Wiesn Day focusing on food

Crazy for me - isn't it? My final day was already last weekend Thursday and was a business get-together there hence I can not post people drinking alcoholic stuff but I made some photos from lovely sweets we enjoyed during the evening.

Wiesn RoundUp

The organisers are happy (as ever year - what else should they report?) with the stats. It is a bit similar to the last years at CeBIT (a technology trade show) that reported growth every year but no one understood. Oktoberfest 2018 had more visitors again even it seemed less people to me but I have not been there so often. Official sources report that after 18 days a total of 6.3 million guests visited the Oktoberfest, including 500.000 guests at the Oide Wiesn.

Top visiting countries and sales stats

The Wiesn organiser analyse visitor stats from abroad by making use of cash machines data and came to the conclusion that these are the top 10 countries to visit Oktoberfest 2018 (Belgium is new in the ranking):

USA, Great Britain, Austria, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Sweden and Belgium

In terms of food & drink sales there was an increase of 10% for food. The hungry visitors requested mainly the traditional Wiesn dishes like duck, pork legs, roast pork and kässpatzen. The beer results have been the same as in 2017 - a total of 7.5 million liters of beer had been drunk.