Paulaner Brewery packs up beers, hits road with portable biergarten

Having trouble bringing a new audience to your beer brand? Might be time to take a page from the Paulaner Brewery playbook and bring the beer brand to them.

Paulaner Brewery, Munich’s traditional Bavarian brewery, is celebrating Oktoberfest early this year and taking its authentic traveling biergarten on a cross-country tour for a second year. Fully equipped with tables, taps and an abundance of Paulaner kegs, this biergarten stops in 19 U.S. cities from late March to mid-October, bringing towns the chance to experience authentic German beer traditions.

Hey, food trucks are big thing in many major cities these days, so why not beer trucks? With Paulaner’s traveling biergarten, any town can be transformed into “Little Bavaria” in a few short hours. A quick unloading of the party truck and an upscale venue is built, complete with a sound system, Bavarian decorations and traditional biergarten tables and benches that can host up to 400 guests.

Here is a quick video tutorial on how it works.

The origins of the biergarten can be traced back to the 16^th century in Munich. The Bavarian Brewing Ordinance was enacted in 1539 following a series of serious brewery fires and restricted beer brewing to the winter months between September and April. For the breweries, which needed stocks of cool beer for the summer, this presented an insurmountable problem. The solution was the underground beer cellar. The brewers protected their beer against the sun’s heat by planting large numbers of chestnut trees and spreading out light-coloured gravel. From 1812 onward, King Ludwig I of Bavaria permitted breweries to serve their own beer to guests on the land above the beer cellar. Hence, the Biergarten was born.

Paulaner’s party truck was hanging out in Stillwater and St. Paul, Minn., for the first part of June and hosted a variety of events with beer specials, food, live music and more. A 5k run and a biking for beer event were mixed in also. From Minnesota, the truck continues to 12 more U.S. cities in Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Florida and has its last call in Las Vegas in mid-October.