An Oktoberfest survival guide

The biggest German party of the year is only a few days away. Oktoberfest is celebrated - oddly, mostly in September - not only in Munich, where the festival was inaugurated just over 200 years ago, but in cities with expatriate German communities all over the world.

One of those is Hong Kong. Oktoberfest celebrations were pioneered here in the 1980s by the Holiday Inn Golden Mile Hotel, which at that time had a German general manager and a German flagship Western restaurant, The Baron's Table. Festivities took place in one of the hotel's ballrooms.

In 1991, the Marco Polo Hongkong Hotel raised the game by organising a much larger outdoor event - the Marco Polo German Bierfest.

The event has been repeated every year since then - growing larger in scale and longer in duration. It has become the hotel's signature event, says director of catering Cyrina Chan. In 2011, the Marco Polo German Bierfest achieved a record attendance of 50,000 guests, who between them managed to ingest an impressive 70,000 litres of beer, 7,500 metres of wurst and 30,000 pretzels.

This year's festival runs from October 19 to November 10, and Chan and her team are hoping to mark its 21st anniversary by pulling in an even bigger crowd.

So what makes Oktoberfest such a big deal? In Hong Kong it has quite a lot to do with a combination of warm weather and cold beer, but the original festival was an open air party, thrown on October 12, 1810, for the citizens of Munich, by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, to celebrate his marriage.