Prost! Oktoberfest Comes to Tonbridge - and a Toast to West Kent's Own Beer History

Lederhosen, oompah bands and steins the size of your forearm are coming to Tonbridge Racecourse this month, as Oktoberfest Tonbridge sets up its marquee on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October. It felt like the right excuse to ask a question most of us never stop to think about over a pint: where does any of this actually come from - the festival, the beer, and the breweries doing it properly right here in West Kent?

Here's the bit that surprises most people: the original Oktoberfest, Munich, 1810, had almost nothing to do with beer. It was a wedding party. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen on 12 October that year, and a Bavarian National Guard officer named Andreas Michael Dall'Armi suggested marking it with a horse race on the meadows just outside the city gates. It went down so well that Munich decided to do it all again the following year, and the year after that, until "again next year" quietly became an annual tradition. The beer, the tents and the lederhosen all got bolted on later. The meadow itself was named Theresienwiese in the bride's honour - still the festival's home today, and still shortened by locals to simply "the Wiesn."

If Oktoberfest is a relative newcomer, beer itself is pushing 4,000 years old at a conservative estimate. The oldest known recipe for it survives on a Sumerian clay tablet from around 1800BC - a poem in honour of Ninkasi, goddess of brewing, that doubles as an instruction manual for turning twice-baked barley bread into something drinkable. Nobody can say for certain how strong it actually was (modern attempts to recreate it land somewhere around 3.5-4%), but we do know it was brewed with the solids still floating in it, which is reportedly why Sumerians drank it through a straw rather than face a mouthful of bread crumbs with every sip. Closer to home (in brewing terms, if not geography), Germany's Reinheitsgebot of 1516 - the "beer purity law" limiting brewers to water, barley and hops - is often called the oldest food regulation still observed anywhere. That's a bit generous: an EU court actually struck it down as anti-competitive back in 1987, so it hasn't been enforceable law for almost 40 years. German brewers just carried on following it anyway, out of habit and bragging rights, which might be the most German thing about the whole story.

It's easy to think of hops and beer as a German or Czech speciality, but Kent has its own 500-year claim on the subject. Hop-growing is thought to have arrived in the county in the 16th century with Flemish weavers fleeing religious persecution - so associated with the period that an old English rhyme claims "Hops, Reformation, bays and beer / Came to England all in one year." By the Victorian era hop-growing dominated the county, with Kent producing the lion's share of a British hop industry that peaked at around 77,000 acres nationally in 1878, and the distinctive conical oast houses built to dry the crop became - and remain - one of the most recognisable shapes in the county's countryside. For decades, hop-picking season each September brought tens of thousands of Londoners down to Kent for a working holiday in the fields, a tradition that only really faded once mechanical harvesters took over in the 1950s. "The Garden of England" earned a fair chunk of that nickname from hops, not just apples.

That heritage didn't stay in the history books - West Kent still brews, and some of it is genuinely excellent. Westerham Brewery (Sevenoaks borough) is the standout story: brewing in the town is documented as far back as 1608, and its best-known name, the Black Eagle Brewery, ran a large tower brewhouse there from 1850 until production finally stopped in 1965. When the current Westerham Brewery was founded in 2004, its first act was to track down the old Black Eagle yeast strains, preserved since the 1950s at the National Collection of Yeast Cultures, and use them to recreate historic recipes - including the very last beer ever brewed at the old site. A pint there is carrying genuinely old DNA, not just a nostalgic name on the pump clip.

Over in Chiddingstone, near Edenbridge, Larkins Brewery has been brewing on its own hop farm since 1986 and claims to be the only brewery in the UK that only uses hops it grows itself - about as close to "farm to glass" as beer gets. In Maidstone, Goachers has been quietly getting on with it since 1983, when Phil and Debbie Goacher set up a five-barrel plant near Tovil and first sold their Maidstone Ale to the public at a CAMRA beer festival in Mote Park - it's now one of the country's oldest surviving small independent breweries. Tunbridge Wells has Pig & Porter, a modern outfit built on the simple idea of combining good beer with good food, while over in West Malling, Kent Brewery - tagline: "dragging Kent beer into the 21st century" - keeps Tonbridge & Malling's own brewing tradition going on a much more modern footing.

And for a properly ghostly footnote: Maidstone was once home to Fremlins, which grew into the biggest brewery in the county before Whitbread bought it out and shut the Earl Street site in 1972. Its memory lives on more visibly than most defunct breweries manage - Fremlin Walk shopping centre now stands on the old site, with the brewery's elephant logo still perched on top, watching over Saturday shoppers who mostly have no idea they're browsing where the beer used to be made.

Oktoberfest Tonbridge runs at Tonbridge Racecourse (TN9 1HR) across three sessions: Friday 23 October, 6pm-11pm; Saturday 24 October, 12pm-5pm and 6pm-11pm. Expect the Bavarian Strollers on oompah duties, a resident DJ filling the gaps, proper German food (bratwurst, pretzels, frites, with vegan and gluten-free options), and beer served the traditional way - by the stein. It's 18-plus, ID is required on the door, and tickets are advance-only through the event's own box office - there's no paying on the day. Full details, session times and tickets are on the Oktoberfest Tonbridge website.