19 October 2014

Birmingham Oktoberfest 2014 [by @NLi10]

Hallo und willkommen to Oktoberfest!  Yes - I know it happens a little earlier in the real countries, but here in the UK in Birmingham our Oktoberfest was this week.  Running from Wed to Sunday I think this year.  We got organised and got an offer for £6.50 so that we were in the VIP seating area but with very little included food or drink.


We also had table service, but to save the people doing this I decided not to take pictures of this.

This all happened on the evening of the day that I had the BigDog hot dog for lunch so I was worried that it wouldn't stand up to the high quality bar that had been set and i'd be too full to enjoy the food.

First up was Schlumberger - german champagne (I am lead to believe).


This tasted like champagne to me - I'm no expert on wines and similar drinks.  It was drunk, but it wasn't something I'd really enjoyed or would try again.


Next up was 2 pints of German beer for £11.  This is a little expensive, but with the table service and the atmosphere I couldn't complain.  It was to be the only purchase outside of the vouchers that I made so was worth it.  It tasted like weak German beer.  It wasn't bad by any stretch but it did suffer a little when the last 1/4 of a pint was sat at the bottom a little flat after bashing glasses during drinking songs.


Our included plate meal was pork, cabbage and potato with onion gravy.  I liked this and wasn't upset for what we paid.  I did forget to take a picture with all that was going on though!  With our meal there were two surprise puddings. The first was alcoholic and called Underberg. I'd never heard of this but was advertised as £4 a bottle on the menu.  It's 44% too - so similar to Jagermeister in it's 'herbal drink that the cool kids use as a mixer' angle.  Tasting a little like absinthe it brought back many memories and had a distinct and lingering herbal aftertaste.  We shared the one we got with our initial starter meals (8 vouchers for 6 people :D) and expected to get ones with our main voucher meals, but we only got the sweet puddings and our alcohol puddings never came.  Shame really, but it was a little chaotic by that point.


And this is the sweet pudding.  Surprisingly soft gingerbread covered in incredibly sweet icing was a good counterpoint to the 2 pints of beer.  I never got around to ordering the breadzel that  I was tempted by on the menu due to my meal on the way.


The music was silly and thematic and a lot of fun.  Sitting right at the front we escaped the poor weather and had a very good night.

All in all for £17.50 total spend for me I had a great time, and we are thinking of doing it again in the future.  I think we'd try to get a deal that included the first drink (although those looked like the £3 half a pint beers) and the sausage and fries meal as it probably wouldn't be much more expensive.







1 comment:

Helen said...

I was there on Sunday! It was very expensive but I had such a good time