The Highs & Lows of Doolally Oktoberfest

This post is way overdue. Apologies.

It’s been a week now, but going back to the ‘Oktoberfest weekend’, here’s a roundup of the Doolally Oktoberfest.

Doolally’s Oktoberfest lasted from Friday evening (14^th October) to Sunday night (16^th October).  This is what it looked like on Saturday.

Saturday morning the Doolally Wagon left Andheri East at 11.30am, filling up as it headed toward its destination – The Corinthian Hotel. I rode the Wagon from Andheri to Bandra and then decided to wait for a friend who was running late. Post that it all when downhill.

I had an awful journey to Pune on a Volvo bus. Everything that could possible go wrong, did. A 3 hour journey lasted 5 and a half hours, the AC wouldn’t work and so when it started raining the windshield fogged up and the wipers didn’t work either so we were stranded until it stopped raining. And that’s only the half of it. But the disastrous trip is another story best left for another day.

If I had to try really, really hard to find a silver lining it would be that the Doolally brews were good enough to make me forget all the misadventures of the day. I reached 30 mins before Happy Hours ended (4-8pm) and could tell that the crowd had made the best use of it. There were 5 different craft beers on tap – Oktoberfestbier Märzen, Hefeweizen (Wheat Beer), Irish Red Ale, Bohemian Pale Ale and Apple Cider.

Pic Credit: Neil Valles

What worked

• The Doolally Beer Wagon was an inspired idea -taking a bus load of people from Mumbai-Pune and back, without them having to worry about finding the Corinthian (not an easy task, trust me). But I heard there were complaints regarding the lack of an AC and entertainment didn’t live up to what was promised. Still, the boys from The Blue Bulb did a great job handling all the logistics.
• The range of beers. The Marzen and Hefeweizen were my favourites.
• The little quest/challenge cards were exciting and fun.
• The Happy Hour rates were a steal. No one minded shelling out 1000 bucks for the passes since it was full cover.

What didn’t

• The cops played kill-joys when they turned up too early. At about 11.30 the live band had to stop playing. But the crowd shifted indoors where the DJ took over.
• The Bohemian Pale Ale didn’t last through half the night. By 7.30pm they were all out so I didn’t get to try any.

I’m not sure how true the Doolally Oktoberfest was to the spirit of Oktoberfest. But as a beer fest which served up some good brews and got a great crowd together, Doolally definitely did an outstanding job. At the end of the night everyone was left asking for more.  Oliver Schauf, Co-owner and Brew master said that the response was a lot more than they had expected and so we’re probably going to see a 2012 repeat! 😀

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