The world’s largest beer festival starts on September 19. Each year, six to seven million revellers enter Oktoberfest’s giant tents.

Oktoberfest serves Märzen/Festbier in 1 litre steins at long tables beneath thick wooden beams decorated with hops and Bavarian bunting. But it wasn’t always that way. The first Oktoberfest wasn’t a beer festival at all. It was a wedding.

Well, that’s an over-simplification. Since the beginning, Oktoberfest has been a cultural event. It weaves history, nation-building, and the human need for conviviality and celebration into the background of a turbulent and ever-changing world.

In this week’s Time Machine, we’re going back about ten years, to a time when hops looked like the new cash crop and craft beer was not only the hottest trend in drinks, but a cultural phenomenon.

Independent hop yards popped up across North America in the mid-2010s, riding a wave of demand. But consumer tastes changed and agriculture struggled to keep up.

This is a story about agricultural entrepreneurs fighting for survival in a past-paced 21st century economy.

When was the last time you got together with friends?

It can seem that at times we live private, parallel lives with our friends. We know they’re out there, but we don’t often see them.

Creating a third place where people can connect is the driving idea behind Good Cheer. And it’s nothing new. People have always created communal places to connect with one another and, as we’ll see in today’s Time Machine, sometimes those places haven't just sustained morale. They have sustained life itself…

It began with twelve monks, two horses, and a patch of soggy forest nobody wanted.

It became one of the most remarkable breweries in the world.

The beer they make is outstanding, but that’s perhaps the least impressive part of the story. This brewery was founded in a monastery and run by monks with the goal of improving life in the surrounding region.

But the Nazis almost destroyed it. And yet it only got better.