by Dow Scoggins
Tucked into the Blue Ridge foothills of North Georgia, the little town of Helen throws a party every fall that outlasts every other Oktoberfest in the country. What began as a scrappy reinvention of a fading lumber town has grown into a two-month celebration of polka, pretzels, and beer — and it’s been going strong for more than 50 years.
From Lumber Town to Little Bavaria
Helen wasn’t always Bavarian. In the late 1960s it was a played-out logging town looking for a reason to exist. A group of local businessmen, working with artist John Kollock, decided to rebuild the entire downtown to look like an Alpine village — cobblestone walkways, half-timbered facades, flower boxes, the works. It wasn’t a stage set for a weekend festival; it was permanent construction, which is exactly why the town still looks the part today. The gamble worked, and the newly built Helen Festhalle hosted Helen’s very first Oktoberfest in 1970 — just a year after the town’s Bavarian makeover was finished. More than 50 years later, it’s still going, now stretching from mid-September clear through Halloween, with oom-pah bands, steins the size of your forearm, and a schedule so long that fall foliage season and Oktoberfest season overlap almost perfectly.
A Brewer in the Parade
I once had a front-row seat to a slice of that history. From 1989 to 1997, I ran Friends Brewing — Georgia’s first craft brewery — where we made a beer called Helenboch. In a town built entirely around a German theme, having an actual working brewery right there was a natural fit, and Oktoberfest was the biggest stage of the year to show it off.
Over those years, our crew marched in a half-dozen Oktoberfest parades, done up in full lederhosen, hauling one of the old parade wagons down the main street while the Helenboch models rode up top. The photos here are from the 1990 and 1991 parades — my fellow brewery directors and I pulling the wagon while it does the rounds through downtown Helen, right past the Alpine Helen sign that greets every visitor coming into town.
It’s a strange, wonderful thing to watch a festival you once marched in as a young brewer grow into the one of the largest and longest-running Oktoberfest in the United States. The town’s still the same postcard-Bavarian backdrop, the beer’s still flowing at the Festhalle, and somewhere in a box of old photos, the wagon’s still rolling.
Address: Helen Festhalle, 1074 Edelweiss Strasse, Helen, GA 30545
Website: helenga.org
