Oktoberfest 2026 starts on Saturday 19 September, which means anyone thinking about hosting has roughly a fortnight to get organised. That is a useful amount of time rather than a comfortable one, because the two things that actually make Oktoberfest at home work, the right style of beer and the right food, both benefit from being sorted in advance rather than on the day.
This is a guide to doing it properly without pretending your living room is a Munich beer tent. The good version of this party is not about decorations. It is about serving the right beer at the right temperature alongside food that was designed to go with it.
The first thing worth knowing is that Oktoberfest beer is a specific thing, not a marketing label, and it has changed over time.
The historic style is Maerzen: an amber, malt-driven lager traditionally brewed in March, before summer brewing became impractical, then stored in cold cellars until autumn. It is richer and browner than everyday lager, with a bready, faintly toasty character and a clean dry finish.
Since roughly the 1970s, most of the Munich breweries have poured Festbier at the festival instead. It is paler, lighter-bodied and crisper, sitting around 5.8 to 6.3 per cent. The reason is simple commerce: people drink more of a lighter beer across a long day. Only six Munich breweries are permitted to serve at the festival itself, all of them brewing within the city limits.
The practical takeaway for hosting is that both styles are lagers, both are stronger than the pint you would normally drink, and both are fermented cold and served cold. If you cannot get hold of a German Maerzen, a clean, well-made lager is a far better substitute than any ale. Have a look at the beer range and lean towards the crisp end of it.
The Mass, the one-litre glass mug, is the image everyone has in mind. It is also the single most common way a home Oktoberfest goes wrong.
A full litre of beer takes most people well over an hour to drink, and beer poured cold into a warm glass at room temperature will be lukewarm long before the glass is empty. In the beer tents this does not matter because turnover is fast and the beer is served at cellar temperature from enormous chilled tanks. In a flat in London it matters a great deal.
Two fixes. First, chill your glassware, ideally in the freezer for twenty minutes, which does more for the last third of the glass than anything else you can do. Second, consider half-litre glasses. They look less dramatic and they mean every mouthful is cold. If you want the full Mass for the photograph, pour one at the start and switch to halves afterwards.
German lager is served colder than British ale and warmer than an ice-cold macro lager: roughly 6 to 8 degrees is the target. Straight from a domestic fridge, which runs at 4 or 5, is slightly too cold, so give it a few minutes.
Pour at an angle to start, then straighten up for the last third to build a proper head. A thick head is not decoration. It traps aroma and protects the beer beneath it from oxidising, which matters if you are drinking slowly out of a large glass. If you are opening bottles rather than a keg, keep them lying somewhere genuinely cold rather than stacked on a counter waiting their turn.
Oktoberfest food exists to keep people upright, and it is salty, fatty and starchy for exactly that reason.
The essentials, in order of effort: soft pretzels, which you can buy frozen and bake on the day; obatzda, a Bavarian cheese spread made by mashing ripe camembert with butter, paprika and finely chopped onion, which takes five minutes and improves after a night in the fridge; good sausages, ideally bratwurst or weisswurst; and a warm potato salad dressed with stock, vinegar and mustard rather than mayonnaise.
If you are doing one thing beyond beer, make it the obatzda. It costs very little, it is genuinely delicious, and it does more to make the evening feel authentic than any amount of bunting. Roast pork with crackling is the traditional centrepiece if you want to cook properly.
This is the part that gets skipped and should not be. A litre of six per cent beer contains roughly six units. Two of them is a serious amount of alcohol, and Oktoberfest sessions run long by design.
Plan for it the way the Bavarians do. Food comes out early and keeps coming. Water is on the table from the start, not fetched apologetically at hour four. And there is no shame in a half-litre. If you are hosting a mixed group, put a decent non-alcoholic option out alongside the beer so that pacing does not require anyone to explain themselves.
Two weeks out is a good moment to work out numbers. A rough guide for a four-hour session is two to three litres of beer per drinking guest, which sounds enormous until you remember that is four to six half-litre glasses across an afternoon and evening.
Order the beer far enough ahead that you can get it properly cold, since a fridge packed with warm bottles takes several hours to catch up. Buy more than you need on the assumption that the leftovers keep perfectly well, which is more than can be said for a party that runs dry at eight in the evening.
Whether you are stocking up in advance or discovering on the day that you are two crates short, we deliver across London within the M25 in 30 to 45 minutes, 24 hours a day. Check our delivery areas, or take a look at the mixed cases if you would rather not choose bottle by bottle. There are spirits too, for anyone who wants a schnapps to finish.
Please drink responsibly. Drinks House 247 operates a Challenge 21 policy - you must be 18 or over to order, and our drivers will ask for photo ID if you look under 21.
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