Urban Chestnut Oktoberfest
St. Louis, Missouri
Urban Chestnut Oktoberfest - officially Oktoberfest St. Louis - is the annual Oktoberfest thrown by Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, first held in 2011 at the brewery's Midtown Biergarten in the year the brewery opened. The 2026 edition runs Friday, October 2 through Sunday, October 4 at the Grove Brewery and Bierhall, 4465 Manchester Avenue, and the brewery is promising a weekend of beer, festive music, and German fare and more. General admission has been free in recent editions, with beer bought by token or stein fill, and for 2026 a VIP package is sold in advance: a one-liter commemorative glass stein, two drink tickets, a buffet by Niche Food Group of bratwursts, pretzels, schnitzel, and pizza, terrace seating over the stage, a private bar and restrooms, and an Oktoberfest hat or flower crown, with tables of eight available and the VIP area 21 and over.
The festival has real history for a brewery event. The 2019 edition ran along Washington Avenue from the Midtown Biergarten west to the Circus Flora big top and drew well over 30,000 people, the largest festival in company history. Rather than skip 2020, the tenth edition became an Oktoberfest-lite of four socially distanced, capacity-limited weekends from September 19 to October 10 at Midtown, with a maximum of 17 reserved tables a night, a commemorative one-liter stein per table, and a German platter of bratwurst with homemade sauerkraut, potato salad, and pretzel for every guest. Since 2022 the main event has lived in the Grove, spilling out of the Bierhall onto Manchester Avenue: October 7-8 in 2022, September 29-30 in 2023, October 11-12 in 2024 with a family day of Bavarian brunch, lawn games, and face painting at Midtown on the Sunday, and September 26-28 in 2025, when St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer tapped the ceremonial first keg with a wooden mallet. Stein-holding run as a proper Masskrugstemmen - one arm, keep it level, spill a drop and you are done - plus a silent disco, axe throwing, a mechanical bull, Bavarian pronunciation games, and Oktoberfest-themed craft vendors have filled out recent programs, with the Bolzen Beer Band a recurring headliner.
The beer is the point. Urban Chestnut's Oktoberfest lager is O-Katz - short for Oachkatzlschwoaf, a Bavarian dialect word so hard to pronounce that the staff shortened it - a malty, balanced Marzen-style lager at 5.4 percent that took gold at the 2017 Brussels Beer Challenge and the 2017 World Beer Championships and comes back on tap every fall. It pours alongside Zwickel Bavarian lager at 5.1, Schnickelfritz Bavarian weissbier at 5.0, and Stammtisch German pilsner at 5.4. Co-founder and brewmaster Florian Kuplent is German-born and trained: he apprenticed as a teenager at Erharting Brauerei in Bavaria, studied brewing at the Bavarian College of Food and Beverage Science and then at Weihenstephan, and developed Shock Top Belgian White and other recipes at Anheuser-Busch before opening Urban Chestnut with David Wolfe on January 26, 2011. The brewery's Reverence series of classic European styles sits next to its Revolution series of modern American beers, an approach it calls beer divergency.
The Grove Brewery and Bierhall opened in 2014 in the Forest Park Southeast neighborhood, and in 2015 Urban Chestnut bought the closed Burgerbrau brewery in Wolnzach, in the heart of the Hallertau hop region, as its Hallertauer Brauerei. Dates float from year to year - late September or the first half of October - so check the current edition's details when they are announced.
This page is the permanent home of the Urban Chestnut Oktoberfest on Beer.Social. When the next edition is announced we link the current dates and details here, and past editions are archived below.
Next edition
Oktoberfest St. Louis — October 2, 2026 – October 5, 2026 hosted by Urban Chestnut Grove Brewery and Bierhall. Event details and RSVP