I got invited to attend this Oktoberfest Tournament, this past Saturday (10/7/23), for the second straight year. A friend of mine’s family has been doing it for 3 or 4 years now at their house in Brentwood, TN. (Thanks Steve and Jenny) It’s a lot of fun and they go all out – they make German pretzels from scratch as well as sauerkraut, multiple kinds of brats and sausages, apple turnover and someone brought a pork Butt and German Chocolate cake. Not to mention all of the other snacks that were there.
How It Works
This year we had 16 different brands of Oktoberfests with 8 being German and 8 being American in a bracket style tournament. There were 6 of us doing 2 tastings at a time – and us voting if we liked A or B better and C or D better. We were tasting each of them blindly and a couple of times we needed a tie breaker when we voted 3-3 – the tie breaker for each were alternating wives picking the one they liked the best.
We had the 8 Germans going up against each other in 1 bracket and the 8 Americans going up against each other in another bracket – in order to get the final four to match up against each other to determine the winner. This was a double elimination tournament meaning that the first 4 beers that lost in the first round – would go into a loser’s bracket and match up against each other- for us to taste again and ultimately pick a winner from that group. The winner of the loser’s bracket and the overall winner of the bracket each make it to the final four to match up against the other bracket. At this point we have (2) American beers and (2) German beers in the final four. (1) American and (1) German beer each squared off, in 2 separate rounds, with both American beers winning to advance to the finals against each other.
Below are some pictures of the glasses we used and a couple of the trays used for serving per round. For each round we sampled 2 different beers each and voted for the one we liked the best.
The Results
These are the beers that were entered into the tournament. They are in no particular order.
I have a more detailed account of every matchup below so you can see the full list and pairings along with the actual handwritten brackets that were used during the tournament. I couldn’t quite figure out how to add a bracket to this post, hence the tables below and pictures of the actual brackets.
We started with the German bracket and although I’m listing the names of the beers in the matchups – we obviously didn’t know what they were at the time. These were the matchups in the order we did them.
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