von Trapp Oktoberfest

Stowe, Vermont

von Trapp Oktoberfest is the annual Oktoberfest held at the von Trapp Brewing Bierhall at 1333 Luce Hill Road in Stowe, Vermont, by the brewery attached to the von Trapp Family Lodge and Resort - the family that inspired The Sound of Music. The 2026 edition was held on Saturday, September 19, 2026, and the brewery billed it as the seventeenth annual. The 2027 edition is already posted for Saturday, September 18, 2027, billed as the eighteenth annual. The festival runs in two ticketed sessions rather than as one open gate, and the Inseldudler Band plays both of them, with Trachten contests for traditional Oktoberfest outfits, a cask tapping and Steinholding competitions at each session.

Tickets are all-inclusive rather than pay-as-you-go. An adult ticket takes in a commemorative stein with beer plus an appetizer, entree and dessert ticket. A student ticket for under-21s swaps the beer for a non-alcoholic drink and keeps the three food tickets. A child ticket for ages four to twelve covers a drink plus appetizer and dessert. The appetizer stations run to braised maple pork belly with pickled red onion, a whole bratwurst with bacon apple sauerkraut, two soft pretzels with house mustards, and a pickled beet salad of mixed greens, beets, carrot and cucumber in a house tarragon vinaigrette. The entree stations are Austrian-style boiled beef with potato rosti and horseradish applesauce, a mushroom stroganoff with vegan noodles, Austrian beef goulash with Bandnudeln, and chicken schnitzel with jager sauce and red cabbage. Dessert is a choice of German chocolate cheesecake, plum almond tart or apple cake.

The house festbier is simply called Oktoberfest - a 5.6 percent full-bodied amber lager brewed in the traditional Marzen style from a blend of light and dark Munich malts, with notes of graham cracker, caramel and bread crust and floral, peppery aromas from Hallertau and Tettnang hops. It is in market from July 15 to October 15 and took a silver medal at the 2019 Great International Beer, Cider, Mead and Sake Competition. At the Bierhall it pours next to the rest of the Austrian and German lineup: Helles at 4.9 percent, the Munich-style golden lager the brewery was built on, Kolsch at 5.0, Vienna amber lager at 5.2, Dunkel at 5.7, the award-winning Bohemian Pilsner at 5.4 served on a Lukr pour, a 4.0 percent light lager, and Natur Helles, the unfiltered version of the flagship packaged straight from the fermentation cellar.

The brewery is younger than the lodge it sits on. The family settled in Stowe in the 1940s after touring the United States as a singing group, began welcoming guests into their 27-bedroom home in the summer of 1950, lost the original building to a fire in 1980, and rebuilt it as a 96-room alpine lodge on a 2,600-acre property that includes the first cross-country ski center in the United States. Brewing started in 2010 in the basement of the resort's Kaffeehaus bakery under the name Trapp Lager Brewing, a deliberate answer to a Vermont craft scene then dominated by heavy, hoppy ales - the goal was the kind of lager you can have at lunch without needing a nap afterwards. In 2015 the business rebranded as von Trapp Brewing and opened a 30,000-square-foot brewery on Luce Hill Road with a Rolec brew house capable of up to 36,000 barrels a year, later adding a 200-kilowatt rooftop solar array. The beers are made from four ingredients only - yeast, hops, malt and water - and the water comes from a natural spring found on the property after an 1898 USGS survey map was read carefully, piped downhill by gravity, and close enough in mineral composition to the water of Plzen that the brewery treats it as the base of everything it makes. The brewery's own site bills it as the 2024 Great American Beer Festival Brewery of the Year, and the flagship Helles carries a 2024 Great American Beer Festival grand champion mark.

Oktoberfest is the ticketed high point of a calendar that otherwise runs on walk-ins. The Bierhall and gift shop open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., brewery tours run several times a week, and the Bierhall Music Series plays the biergarten on Saturday nights from June through Columbus Day weekend from 4:30 to 7 p.m. - in 2026 the September 19 slot in that series was Oktoberfest itself, the only ticketed date on the list. The same autumn weeks bring a Blessing of the Animals on the concert stage, a trail marathon across the lodge's own trail system in mid-October, and foliage that makes Luce Hill Road worth the drive on its own. The tagline the brewery uses for all of it is a little of Austria, a lot of Vermont.

This page is the permanent home of the von Trapp 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 — September 18, 2027 hosted by Von Trapp Brewing. Event details and RSVP

Past editions

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