SEOUL, September 13 (AJP) - A vast white festival tent rose across the main plaza of Seoul's Oil Tank Culture Park on Saturday, surrounded by rows of blue parasols, beer and food stalls and crowds spilling beyond its entrance.
A long line stretched along the park's main walkway toward the festival grounds. In the outdoor Beer Garden, visitors moved between tables, food stands, merchandise booths and a stall renting Bavarian-style clothing.
Some of the longest lines were for beer.
Visitors queued at German beer counters before carrying heavy glass steins back to their tables, while trays of Schweinshaxe, sausages, schnitzel and pretzels came out from nearby food stalls.
Dirndls and lederhosen mixed with T-shirts and jeans. Some visitors had arrived already dressed for the occasion. Others stopped to rent an outfit or picked up chicken-shaped hats sold around the grounds.
At the center of it all was the Big Tent.
Built for roughly 4,500 seats, the white structure took up much of the festival site. Inside, rows of tables stretched toward the stage beneath strips of blue, yellow and burgundy fabric hanging from the high ceiling, with beer mugs and plates crowding the tabletops.
The room did not stay seated for long.
When the German brass band began playing "Ein Prosit," steins went up around the tent. Visitors leaned across tables to shout "Prost," clink glasses and dance beside their chairs. Some linked arms while others held up phones toward the stage.
At one point, the musicians left the stage and moved through the crowd, playing trumpets and clarinets between the tables.
What had looked minutes earlier like a huge dining hall had turned into a standing party.
"It felt like they had created a place for us to actually join in," said Lee Hyun-seok, a 38-year-old office worker from Suwon who regularly attends beer festivals.
Lee said he has been to the Songdo Beer Festival, Cass festivals and several similar events in South Korea, but found the atmosphere here different.
"At some beer festivals, it feels more like you are drinking while watching celebrities perform," he said. "Here, I was drinking while actually becoming part of the party."
He recalled people doing the chicken dance, linking arms and singing along with others around them.
"It felt like everyone became part of the same group," he said.
The crowd also caught him off guard. Lee said the Big Tent felt packed once he entered and queues formed around both beer and food counters. At one point, he estimated that he waited about an hour to get a beer.
"I didn't know people would be this serious about it," Lee said. "Koreans were coming dressed in German traditional clothes and wearing chicken hats. You could tell people really came here to enjoy themselves."
Outside the tent, the festival was more spread out.
Rows of blue parasols covered the Beer Garden, where visitors sat with drinks or moved between food stalls, photo zones and sponsor booths. Some sat on nearby grass while others stopped along the park's walkways before heading back toward the tent.
FC Bayern Munich was operating a pop-up booth on the grounds. Bavarian-style outfits were available for rent, and other stalls sold festival goods and food.
Ten German beer brands are being served during the festival, including Paulaner, Krombacher and Schneider, alongside South Korean craft brewer Original Beer Company.
The venue itself gives the festival an unusual backdrop.
Oil Tank Culture Park was once the Mapo Oil Depot, a petroleum storage complex built in the 1970s after the first oil crisis. It was closed ahead of the 2002 World Cup and later converted into a cultural space, reopening to the public in 2017.
The old cylindrical tanks still rise around the park, looking down over the festival grounds.
For Kate Schmidt, a 29-year-old German living in Gwangmyeong, parts of the Seoul festival felt familiar.
She pointed to the brass band, the colorful fabric hanging from the Big Tent ceiling, heart-shaped gingerbread necklaces and the outdoor Beer Garden.
"You could see how much effort went into giving the Big Tent a German feel," Schmidt said. "The indoor atmosphere was lively and the energy felt very real. People were dancing everywhere."
She said Munich's Oktoberfest is much larger, with more than 10 major beer tents offering different food, drinks and atmospheres. Seoul has one main Big Tent.
"But it still brought back a lot of memories," she said.
Schmidt also noticed children around the festival grounds.
"Oktoberfest in Germany is also a festival where a lot of families come," she said. "So I really liked seeing children here too."
Oktoberfest Seoul 2026 opened Saturday for a 10-day run through Sept. 21. Organizers say it is the first event in South Korea officially authorized by Munich to use the Oktoberfest name.
The original Oktoberfest dates to 1810, when celebrations were held in Munich for the marriage of Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig, later King Ludwig I, and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
The festivities included a horse race on the grounds now known as Theresienwiese, which remains the home of Oktoberfest. The large beer halls now associated with the festival developed later in the 19th century.
Seoul's opening ceremony also drew on traditions from Munich.
Before the first keg was tapped, Jörn Beißert, deputy head of mission at the German Embassy in Seoul, welcomed the crowd and said Oktoberfest was about more than beer, food and music.
Germany and South Korea already cooperate closely in areas including business, science, politics and research, he said, but formal ties were only part of the relationship.
"What matters most is when people come together, talk, laugh and meet new friends, like today," Beißert said. "I think that is when ties become even stronger."
He said organizers wanted the festival to provide that kind of meeting place, bringing German tradition together with Seoul's atmosphere and hospitality.
After his remarks, attention turned to a wooden beer keg on the stage.
Schmidt found that particularly amusing.
"In Germany, people joke about how many hits it takes someone to open the keg," she said, laughing. "Today, it took quite a lot."
The joke has a history of its own. Munich's official keg-tapping tradition began in 1950, when then-Mayor Thomas Wimmer needed 17 strikes to open the first barrel. The best recorded performance since then is two.
Once the keg was tapped, the Bavarian call "O'zapft is!" — "It is tapped" — marked the opening of the festival. Communal toasts followed before the brass band took over.
Among those who had gone to some effort to dress for the occasion was Shin Ji-su, a 22-year-old university student from Seoul.
She came with four friends. All five had bought Bavarian-style outfits online before the festival.
"We like going to festivals together, and as soon as we found out about this one, we decided to come," Shin said.
For her, the appeal went beyond beer.
"There are limits to learning about another country from a history book or in class," she said. "When you actually experience the culture somewhere, there is an atmosphere and liveliness that writing, pictures or videos can't give you."
Schmidt said seeing Korean visitors embrace the clothing, music and other festival traditions was one of the things she enjoyed most.
"It made me really happy that an event like this was happening in Korea," she said. "Seeing Korean people and people from different countries all enjoying themselves together made me proud to be German."
She said she hoped more events like it would give people opportunities to experience German culture outside formal settings.
A German Culture Showroom at Oil Tank 6 is also running during the festival's two weekends, with books, short films, children's activities and information on studying and living in Germany.
By late afternoon, the band was still playing inside the Big Tent.
Another song started. People got back on their feet, and the beer glasses went up again.
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