The Walberlafest in Franconia: A Beer Fest Woven from Legends

~A Tale of Two Walberlas~

As I approached the summit of the Walberla, I couldn’t help but think that only the Germans would schlepp an entire beer fest up a mountain. And no ordinary mountain. The Walberla is shrouded in legends of witches’ sabbaths and pagan rituals welcoming spring.

The Walberla has intrigued me since the day I set eyes on it. The first time I hiked up, it was a forebodingly cloudy day. Not a soul around. Just me and the wind approaching that spare chapel dedicated to St. Walpurga.

I’ve hiked the Walberla several times now, and there’s always something ineffable about it. The Walberla is unique. It’s a tabletop mountain that’s also a dual saddle mountain. Topographically speaking, the Ehrenbürg (the name of the entire ensemble) is a double-peaked butte on the edge of the Franconian Jura range. The taller of the two peaks is the Rodenstein (532 m), which affords you a fabulous view across the tabletop to the Walberla (514 m), a peak that has fascinated locals and foreign wanderers for over a millennium.

It’s in the center of the Walberla saddle where pagans once performed rituals to placate the gods or to celebrate the arrival of spring. It’s also where early Christians built a chapel dedicated to St. Walpurga, the Anglo-Saxon missionary who settled in Germany.

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If solitude on a mountaintop is sublime, wandering through the stalls and tents of the Walberlafest is an entirely different experience. The magic is still there, but it’s suffused with merriment.

And this is what makes the Walberla so special. Registering the vastness of the sky stretched over the valley below, earthenware mug of fresh Franconian beer in hand, is not something you can do at every beer fest. Even if you won’t have those moments of quiet contemplation, you also won’t feel like you’re sharing the moment with the multitudes. Oktoberfest this isn’t.

But why a beer fest atop a forlorn mountain?

Historical Interlude: Walpurga on the Walberla

Before the arrival of Christianity, the Walberla was the redoubt of gods. The pagans of the region established a holy site on this tabletop mountain where they conducted rituals and celebrated festivals, including a spring festival celebrated with dances and bonfires in honour of a local goddess of fertility. When the Christians arrived in Franconia, they destroyed pagan cultural sites in their wake, including the one atop the Ehrenbürg, building a small chapel on the site where the pagan rituals were once celebrated.[1]

Enter St. Walpurga, who eventually erased the memory of fertility goddesses.

From Pagan Ritual to Witches’ Sabbaths and Walpurgis Night

Walpurga was canonized on 1 May 870, a century after her death. Since then, Christians across central and northern Europe have celebrated the Feast of St. Walpurga and its eve, Walpurgis Night (30 April). Walpurgis Night converged with a variety of pagan festivals that celebrated the arrival of spring. Peasants lit fires on hillsides to drive away winter and ward off the spirits of darkness, a tradition that continues today, especially in the Harz Mountains of central Germany.

At first glance, it might seem curious that early Europeans would celebrate the eve of a saint’s feast day, especially an eve when witches congregated on isolated mountaintops to commune with the devil. But when we peer deeper into the mists of legend and early history, we see a fascinating picture. And it was none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who illuminated the ethnographic aspects of Walpurgis Night and its centuries-long observance in Germany.

While writing his celebrated poem Die erste Walpurgisnacht (later set to music by Felix Mendelsohn), Goethe drew inspiration from a scholar of antiquity who recounted the efforts of the Druids to practice their rituals in the face of Christianity.[2] Pursued by Christians, the German pagan priests “retired with their faithful followers to the desolate, inaccessible mountains of the Harz at the beginning of spring to offer prayer and flame to the shapeless god of heaven and earth.” There, they donned disguises to protect themselves from the armed proselytizers who came looking for them, “thereby keeping their superstitious adversaries at bay.”[3]

Here, at the dawn of Christianity, we see the outlines of a custom that would persist through the Middle Ages into the modern era. Fascinatingly, the later custom of peasants donning horns, making an infernal racket, and setting bonfires to keep evil spirits at bay is an inverted image of practices adopted by the Druids to ward off early Christians bent on stamping out their beliefs.

Superstition in the Shadow of the Walberla

If Walpurga’s feast day was celebrated across Central Europe, it took on a distinct local hue in Franconia. Legend has it that Walpurga assumed the task of consecrating the Walberla to God and building a chapel. But since she couldn’t complete the task herself, she summoned the witches living on the Walberla and forced them to help her. In return, she promised the witches that they could gather on the Walberla once a year to carouse. The date? Walpurgis Night.

Now, Walpurga was also the patron saint of peasants. As such, she protected the dwellers of the forests, valleys, and hills from witches. Though she was the enabler of the mayhem on the Walberla, she was also the one who interceded on behalf of the peasantry to protect them from the witches’ excesses. Yet despite St. Walpurga’s intercession, the fear of demons and witches persisted for centuries. This was especially the case on Walpurgis Night when the witches ran rampant.

In some hamlets at the foot of the Walberla, the young men donned horns and the rest of the villagers raised a ruckus with shawms (an instrument that looks like a cross between a flute and a clarinet) to keep the witches at bay. All around the Walberla, peasants drew three crosses on their barns with specially blessed chalk, or placed a patch of grass with a sprig of elderberry in front of doorways. Others set up crossed rakes against the threshold of their stables to protect the livestock from uninvited spirits. They also braved the mountain itself, lighting bonfires and invoking the protection of St. Walpurga at her chapel.[4]

From Sacred Site to the Walberlafest

The Walberlafest coincides with both May Day and Walpurgis Night, and is the oldest spring festival in Germany. As the witches faded from view, the festival grew from an annual pilgrimage to the Walberla Kärwa* into a fair “attended by merchants from as far away as Saxony, a place where “every imaginable class of merchandise is offered.”[5] Though libations were likely long a part of the festivities atop the Walberla, it’s not entirely clear when the fair metamorphized into a beer festival celebrating the bounty of Franconian beer. But morph it did.

*Variously rendered as Kerwa, Kirta, Kirchweih, these were and are celebrations that commemorate the dedication of a church.

Back to the Present: A Classic Franconian Beer Fest

Today, the Walberlafest is one of Franconia’s premier beer festivals. Prior to the pandemic, upwards of forty Franconian breweries set up shop. In 2024 roughly fifteen breweries were pouring their wares, among them Huppendorfer, Greif, Nikl-Bräu, Penning-Zeißler, Neder, and Brauerei Ott—an impressive lineup, to say the least. And if you time it right, you can be there for the raising of the maypole.

Last year the stars finally aligned for trip to the Walberlafest. The hike up from Forchheim through tranquil villages and wetland meadows took the better part of the morning. Dark clouds hung over the Walberla. By the time I took my first draught of beer in the company of other hale beer wanderers, sunlight had pierced the canopy of clouds, its rays refracting through the smoke from countless grills searing bratwurst and skewered fish. In an instant the Walberlafest became one of my favourite beer fests.

All the beers I drank were fine examples of what makes Franconian beer so special. Brauerei Ott’s richly textured Export is a mélange of brioche, honey and meadows in bloom. Taut and focused, Penning’s beautifully hued amber-orange Vollbier comes with a distinct nuttiness and a touch of dried cherry. And Först’s intriguing unfiltered Premium has all the hallmarks of youth: a light apple and white grape note, fresh hay, and a champagne lees character.

Sunshine eventually got the better of the steely grey sky, as if a curtain had lifted on the stunning vistas across the valley. I imbibed the scenery with my last drops of beer and descended the mountain to the tranquil village of Leutenbach, where once the villagers donned horns to ward off witches and demons. After beers and dinner at Brauerei Drummer, I reeled in the remaining kilometers through rolling emerald hills and got the train back to Forchheim, the memories of my first Walberlafest bathed in the golden orange of sunset.

Nuts and Bolts

The Walberlafest is held every year from Friday to Sunday on the first weekend in May. If May Day falls on a Thursday, most festival stands open up unofficially. The fest kicks off on Friday at 17:00 with the raising of the maypole, and is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10:00. You can get a shuttle from the Kirchehrenbach station along the Forchheim-Ebermannstadt line if you don’t feel like hiking up.

Related Posts

The Canstatter Volksfest: Stuttgart’s Answer to Oktoberfest

From Horse Races to Beer Steins: Oktoberfest Since 1810

Pottenstein: Beer Hiking in the Heart of Franconian Switzerland

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Endnotes

[1] “Walpurgisnacht in Franken: Auf welchen Bergern werden die Hexen bei uns tanzen?” inFranken.de (30 April 2018). It’s worth noting that this is a familiar story across Europe in the early Middle Ages, a time when pagan sites and rituals across the continent were absorbed into Christianity.

[2] Letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter (3 December 1812). Goethe had originally intended that Zelter set his poem to music. See Carolin Eberhardt, “Die erste Walpurgisnacht,” Deutschland-Lese.de.

[3] Cited in “Die erste Walpurgisnacht,” Wikipedia.

[4] “Ort der Legenden und Dämonen,” informational panel, Leutenbach (photographed 4 May 2024) is the basis for this paragraph.

[5] See “Ehrenbürg,” Wikipedia, for this 1801 account by geographer J.B. Koppelt. See also “Ehrenbürg (Walberla), FränkischeSchweiz.com (2017), and “Walpurgis Night,” Wikipedia.

Photos by Franz D. Hofer

© 2025 Franz D. Hofer and A Tempest in a Tankard. All rights reserved.