Munich’s Kocherlball: Sunday morning beer and dancing

Drink in the tradition — and the fun — at Munich’s Kocherlball.

Revellers at the traditional Kocherlballs in a beer garden in Munich’s English Gardens. Picture: Alamy

This being a story about Munich, let’s get the beer out of the way early. How early? Well, the annual Kocherlball in the city’s English Garden officially starts at 6am, but if you want to get a table then best be there by 4am, which is when the bar opens. Or queue overnight. You do have to get up pretty early to beat the Muncheners to their beer.

The Kocherlball (Cooks Ball) is a revival of a 19th century event begun by servants who fancied a bit of what their powdered and powerful masters would get up to, and they sought a time to have their own party. Given the only gap in your average scullery maid’s diary was around 5am on a Sunday, that’s when staff from grand houses around Munich would gather to imbibe, dance and gossip. Last drinks were usually at 8am so they could be back at their posts, airing the beds and preparing the sauerbraten for lunch.

It was a ritual on summer Sundays in the late 19th century until, due to a detected “lack of morality” in the festivities, it was banned in 1904. Fast-forward to 1989 and Germany was ready to party again. The wall was gone, the nation was reuniting and to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the English Garden — an expanse larger than the great city parks of New York and London — Munich revived the Kocherlball. It’s on the third Sunday in July and the early hour doesn’t mean participants don’t make an effort. Many of the approximately 15,000 people of all ages who attend at the Chinese Tower beer garden are in dirndls or lederhosen. Traditional garb can look a bit try-hard but it’s glorious to see the mass of soft skirts, aprons and corsets, leather shorts and shirts in the blue and white check of the city or Bavaria’s red and white.

Unless you’ve booked a table within the restaurant courtyard — my local friend Otto says this needs to be done a year in advance — it’s self-serve in the Bavarian tradition. Buy a ticket at a booth and then run the gauntlet of dancers to get to the beer taps on the other side. But the Kocherlball is no mere excuse for a pre-dawn knees-up. The dancing is led by a couple who demonstrate the steps while a mature-age band pumps out folk tunes. And the city council holds dance classes in the run-up to the event for those who want to perfect their polkas.

By 10am, the event shows no sign of running out of oompah, but my head is turned by cyclists riding by with surfboards under their arms. At the southern end of the garden, the Eisbach, a small man-made tributary of the main Isar River, appears from under Prinzregentstrasse, and here an artificial wave has been created that allows boardriders to hang against the current. Until 2010 it was frowned upon because off the dangers of surfing in a narrow stream at best barely a metre deep and just above the barriers that create the wave. Now, like another English Garden tradition, nude sunbathing, which is conducted in a discreet corner near the Monopteros temple, boardriding is officially sanctioned.

But just watching these daredevils is too strenuous for a pair of dirndl-dressed ladies on the bank opposite me who, with their feet dangling in the water and one still clutching her bottle of hefeweizen, lie dozing. Today the master’s sauerbraten lunch will just have to wait.

• destination-munich.com/kocherlball

• muenchen.de/int/en