Beer and cool weather: the most wonderful time of the year!

Beer: is it the best thing out of Germany ever? Pretty much going with yes. Well. Garden gnomes do come a pretty close second, so we'll call beer German creation #1 and garden gnomes #1A. They're both delightful all year round!

If you were really my friend--and we are friends, right?--you'd buy us both plane tickets to galavant off to Munich, because it's the opening weekend of Oktoberfest and I could sure stand to get out of town for a minute. It's definitely on my bucket list, along with going to the Phillies' Spring Training and eating Rocky Mountain Oysters in the Rocky Mountains.

Given the sizable German diaspora scattered about this great commonwealth, you'd think there would be some pretty epic Oktoberfest celebrations. There are a few to be sure, but not nearly as many as I would have thought. So! Munich it is. 

Since the Munich celebration is the originator, it's predictably monstrous in scale. Somewhere between six and seven million people will stop by during the 16 days the festival lasts this year, and they'll consume upwards of seven million liters of beer. (Which...something about that seems off. I mean, a liter of beer is definitely a big pour, but most people are only having one? Not buying it, somehow. But what do I know?) And all of that beer will be brewed in Munich exclusively and with strict adherence to the super old school German beer purity laws known as Reinheitsgebot. 

So! C'mon. Spoil a guy a little and let's fly to Germany for the weekend. Beer and sausages and pretzels and smart women in dirndls...I promise not to embarrass anyone by trying to scrape all the German I used to speak out of the back of my head.