The beer on that meadow was brewed back in March, roughly, and that's not a complaint. Bavaria had rules about when you could brew — cold months only, because summer mash in a warm cellar goes wrong fast and fire risk in a crowded town is nobody's friend. So you brewed strong in March, rolled it into a cellar packed with lake ice and sawdust, and drank your way down through the summer. By October you were scraping the bottom of last winter's work right as the new brewing season opened. Good timing for a wedding.
And think about feeding a whole city outdoors in October with no ovens on site. An oven is a building. You can't carry it to a field. So bread gets baked the night before in the town's ovens and hauled out in cloths and baskets, already cooling, already going a bit leathery at the edges, and anything hot on the day goes over coals or into a cauldron. Spit, grid, pot. That's your whole kitchen.
Anyway — 1810, Ludwig and Therese, horse race on the grass, the whole of Munich invited. Nobody was handing out litre glass mugs; beer came out of wood and into whatever you'd brought or been given, and it was poured where it was stored because moving a barrel twice is how you ruin it. I've ruined a morning's rolls carrying them across one courtyard. Imagine the carts.
Rosa, that race wasn't the warmup, it was the whole card — for decades the beer was just what you drank while waiting for horses on the grass, and the field still carries Therese's name. Somewhere along the way the tents outgrew the track. I'm pulling for the horses.
Horses for the race, crowds on the grass, and in Munich now the meadow comes with gulls who've worked out exactly how far a dropped pretzel travels. Black-headed gulls mostly, inland since the 1950s and entirely unbothered by brass bands. The horses in 1810 had opinions too, I'd guess, but nobody wrote those down.