When you hear the keywords sustainability and responsibility for future generations, you don’t immediately think of the lavish parties in the Käfer tavern at the Oktoberfest. So far, the Munich chic crowd has not attracted attention due to their outstanding ecological awareness. However, you can now relearn. Because even in your favorite Wiesn meeting place, the future is now green; For example, head chef Andreas Schinharl has taken the suckling pig off the menu and is now using “the whole pig from start to finish”. Sustainable. But that’s not all. On Thursday, Leonhard Geyer, Head of Purchasing at the company headquarters in Prinzregentenstrasse, presented what the Käfer tent has to offer in terms of new partners from the region.
In any case, the Oktoberfest as one of the last bastions of classic Bavarian diets with beer and meat of all kinds – that seems to be slowly changing. Ironically, the Ochsenbraterei, which is clearly positioned by its name, has just announced that it has hired celebrity chef Sebastian Copien to put vegan specialties on the tent menu. And Käfer now also offers Greenforce products in its Käfer-Wiesenschänke – as it has for a long time in its delicatessen temple on Prinzregentenstraße.
Greenforce is a successful start-up from Munich, which mainly offers alternatives to minced meat in the form of ready-to-mix mixes based on pea proteins. There is hardly any difference to real minced meat and Greenforce founder Thomas Isermann is currently in the process of greatly expanding the product range. Among other things, he already has a vegan schnitzel on offer; the latest coup is a vegan white sausage, the taste of which is said to be deceptively close to the original made from veal and pork loin.
The vegan Weißwurst is also available in the Hofbräuzelt
It’s not that easy to check at the moment, the white sausage is sold out in Greenforce’s online shop – but not yet in stationary retail; After all, Greenforce’s products are now represented in 11,000 supermarkets. In any case, the demand for the white sausage was so great that production is currently no longer able to keep up. In the Hofbräuzelt they are available during the Oktoberfest as well as the vegan currywurst. In the Käfer-Wiesnschänke you can find Greenforce minced meat substitute as a filling in a savoy cabbage and tofu roulade and as a small vegan patty in the otherwise trendy “Global Food” salad.
The drink from Schliersee, which Käfer also offers in a special “Oktoberfest Edition”, is probably not quite as healthy as vegan meat substitutes, but definitely very regional. It is the single malt whiskey Slyrs. It’s now the third time that it has been part of the Wiesn edition, but this year it’s the first time in the Käfer tent, which hasn’t been there for the past two years. Of course, the edition, limited to 4130 bottles, also has something to do with beer: the whiskey first matures for five years in the Slyrs warehouse, after which it is placed in selected beer barrels from the Maisel Brothers brewery in Bayreuth for a further nine months, in which special craft Beers with particularly intense, strong flavors have been stored. The two producers have been working together for a long time, Maisel lets his “Bourbon Bock” mature in whiskey barrels, for example.
And then for the first time there is now the right footwear for Oktoberfest-goers with a Beetle cover: vegan sneakers, i.e. completely leather-free, from the Munich manufacturer Monaco Ducks, printed with the red ladybird, which also stands for the delicatessen. With a unit price of 199 euros, one is not under suspicion of having bought from Billigheimer. However, there is no guarantee that you can still walk straight with your shoes after three pints of beer or four shots of Slyrs.