What Munich Eats at Oktoberfest, and Why the Mustard Is Sweet

The Pantry Pulse, 30 September 2026.

Munich's Oktoberfest is into its final days on the Theresienwiese, and the city's midpoint report estimated that 3.8 million guests would have visited by the festival's middle Sunday, against 3.5 million a year earlier. Beside the tents is an older Munich table of lye pretzel, white sausage and sweet mustard, and each of the three has a traditional birth date older than the festival's first beer tent.

The Wiesn at its midpoint

This year's festival opened on Saturday 19 September, when the Mayor of Munich tapped the first barrel of festival beer at noon in the Schottenhamel tent. It closes on Sunday 4 October, when around 60 gun saluters fire at the foot of the Bavaria statue. The city's official guide lists 17 large and 21 small festival tents. The official festival site says the small tents include chicken roasting houses, snack bars and café tents, and it lists fish sandwiches among the things sold at the stalls.

The midpoint report, published by the city on 27 September, puts numbers on the first stretch. Weekday visits, Monday through Thursday, rose 18.5 percent. Festival beer consumption slipped 1.4 percent, non-alcoholic beer rose 4.5 percent, and in partly summer-like weather wheat beer rose 15 percent. On food, the report says bratwurst and half a chicken remain the classics and Kässpatzen the favorite vegetarian dish, and demand for vegetarian and vegan dishes rose slightly.

The city traces the festival to the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig, later King Ludwig I, and Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen on 12 October 1810. Munich's citizens were invited to celebrate on the fields outside the city gates, horse races closed the event, and the decision to repeat the races the next year began the tradition. The city dates the first beer tents and halls, which replaced the beer stands, to 1896, and a mayor first opened the festival by tapping a barrel at Schottenhamel in 1950.

Three Munich foods with birth dates

GenussErbe Bayern, the Bavarian state's food-heritage register, gives each of these three Munich foods a dated origin. GenussErbe tells the lye pretzel's story through Anton Nepomuk Pfannenbrenner, a baker at Munich's royal coffee house in the nineteenth century. In the register's account, he usually glazed his pretzels with sugar water, and one day he reached by mistake for the sodium hydroxide solution kept for cleaning the baking trays. The register counts 11 February 1839 as the first documented day a lye pretzel was sold.

A Bavarian pretzel weighs 50 to 250 grams. It has a thin, glossy, chestnut-brown crust that cracks in the oven, and the crumb inside is moist, tender and pale. The name Bayerische Breze has been an EU protected geographical indication since February 2014, and the UK register gives 21 February 2014 as the date of the original EU registration. GenussErbe calls the pretzel a fixed part of Bavarian Brotzeit culture and an indispensable side for Munich white sausage and Bavarian Leberkäse.

According to the city's annals, the Münchner Weißwurst is said to have been born on 22 February 1857 at the inn Zum Ewigen Licht on Marienplatz. The landlord, known in Bavarian as Moser Sepp, was making veal bratwurst early that morning. With guests already ordering, he filled the pale meat into thicker pork casings, twisted off the links and scalded them in hot water, because he feared they would burst in the pan. The recipe today uses veal, pork back fat, cooked calf's head meat, ice, salt, fresh parsley, onion, pepper, mace and lemon powder.

The old rule that a white sausage must not hear the noon bells dates from when it was sold raw and scalded only just before eating, because the raw meat spoils fast. The sausage steeps in hot water, and GenussErbe says it is juiciest when scalded as hot as it will go without bursting. The commercial method it gives is 25 minutes at 70 degrees Celsius, about 158 degrees Fahrenheit. It is eaten warm and without the skin, and traditional Old Bavarians eat it by hand and zuzeln, or suck, the filling out of the casing. The register names its partners: Bavarian sweet mustard, Brezn and a Bavarian beer.

GenussErbe credits the mustard to Johann Conrad Develey, who opened a mustard factory in central Munich in 1845 and in 1854 first added vinegar, sugar and spices to yellow and brown mustard. The original recipe also took water, salt, onions, ground cloves, a little allspice and nutmeg. The style today is made from mustard seed or brown or yellow mustard flour, water, sugar or honey, spirit vinegar and spices, sometimes with caramel syrup. The mixture is boiled briefly and then cooled, and the register says the mustard flour for a typical Bavarian sweet mustard can be a little coarser. What sets it apart from other mustards is a clearly noticeable sweet taste. It is the favored mustard for white sausage and also goes with other sausages and Leberkäse.

One plate on a Munich table has no sausage on it at all. Obazda is a cheese spread made with Camembert or Brie, or both, sometimes with Romadur, Limburger or cream cheese, plus butter, salt and paprika, and the paprika is required. GenussErbe says Katharina Eisenreich, landlady of the Bräustüberl at Weihenstephan from 1920 to 1958, probably made it known beyond Bavaria by serving it to her guests. It says Obazda belongs in every beer garden, spread on bread or eaten with a Brezn.

A Munich table, dated

No single source lines these dates up. Side by side, the traditional dates for the pretzel, the sweet mustard and the white sausage fall within 18 years of one another, and all three are older than the festival's first beer tent. The right-hand column is the Dispatch's own arithmetic.

The timeline puts the breakfast before the tents. By the time beer moved from stands into halls on the Theresienwiese, which the city dates to 1896, Munich had been eating lye pretzels for more than half a century and white sausage for close to four decades.

A white-sausage table at home

The sweet mustard follows a pattern GenussErbe spells out: mustard, vinegar, sugar or honey, and spices, with the mustard flour allowed to be a little coarse. A seed-style mustard with honey stirred in moves toward that style. Edmond Fallot's seed-style Dijon (shop Edmond Fallot seed-style Dijon) is one base, and Bee Squared Apiaries' alfalfa wildflower honey (shop Bee Squared alfalfa wildflower honey) is one sweetener. Start with one part honey to three parts mustard, taste, and add a pinch of ground clove or allspice as a nod to the 1854 recipe.

For Obazda, paprika is the one seasoning the register requires. Burlap & Barrel's Szegedi 178 hot paprika (shop Burlap & Barrel Szegedi hot paprika) suits cooks who want a spread with heat. Fork a ripe Camembert with soft butter and salt, dust in the paprika, and serve it with a pretzel.

The Dijon mustard guide covers the French style and how to use it, and the history of Dijon mustard article traces how Burgundy made it famous. For the sweetener, the honey guide covers how honeys differ.

On Sunday the gun salutes at the Bavaria statue close the festival. The old noon rule for white sausage has outlived the raw sausage it was made for.

Sources & Further Reading

• muenchen.de, City of Munich portal: Oktoberfest in Munich 2026, programme, tents and history
• Oktoberfest.de, Landeshauptstadt München: Opening hours of the Munich Oktoberfest 2026
• Oktoberfest.de, Landeshauptstadt München: Here's the midpoint report for Oktoberfest 2026 (27 September 2026)
• GenussErbe Bayern: Bayerische Breze
• GenussErbe Bayern: Münchner Weißwurst
• GenussErbe Bayern: Bayerischer süßer Senf
• GenussErbe Bayern: Obazda
• GOV.UK, Defra: Bayerische Breze, Protected Geographical Indication register entry