Every fall, the Alpine village of Helen, Georgia — home to the longest-running Oktoberfest in the country — packs its two-square-mile downtown with lederhosen, oom-pah bands, and enough bratwurst to feed Bavaria itself. But for nearly a decade, one of the most talked-about acts in that parade wasn’t a band at all. It was a beer wagon, a Saint Bernard, and the owners of Friends Brewing themselves, dancing their way down Main Street.
From 1989 to 1996, the Helenboch Hoofers turned promoting a beer into performance art. Helenboch — Georgia’s first true craft beer, brewed by Friends Brewing right there in Helen — needed a way to stand out at a festival already drowning in German pageantry. The answer wasn’t a float pulled by hired hands or horses. It was the brewery’s own owners, harnessed up and hauling a hand-pulled, Alpine-styled beer wagon down the parade route themselves, choreographing their steps as they went to keep time.
Trotting alongside them was Heidi, the Saint Bernard who served as Helenboch’s official mascot — the same breed of gentle giant you’d expect to find posted up outside a ski chalet, only now working the crowd at the Helen Festhalle. Rounding out the wagon crew were the “beer babes,” dirndl-clad Hoofers who kept the energy up and the crowd engaged, all while the owners themselves danced the wagon through one of the largest Oktoberfest parades in the country without ever breaking stride.
The act was popular enough that it didn’t stay in the mountains. The Hoofers took the Helenboch wagon on the road to Atlanta, appearing in multiple parades there throughout the early ’90s and introducing the beer — and the brewery owners dancing behind it — to a much bigger city audience than Helen’s Main Street could offer. Come December, the troupe swapped Oktoberfest polka for the holidays, caroling their way through crowds as an extension of the same roadside showmanship that had made them local celebrities in the first place.
Helenboch Hoofer’s Running Club
The Hoofers name eventually grew into something runners could join in on, too. Friends Brewing launched the Helenboch Hoofer Running Club during this same stretch, complete with its own branded running shirts for members. True to form, the club made sure no one crossed the finish line without a reward worth running for — plenty of Helenboch beer waiting at the end for the thirsty Hoofers who’d earned it.
By the time the act wound down in 1997, Helenboch itself was already fading — the original Helen brewery had stopped brewing by ’91, though the beer lived on as a contract-brewed label for a few more years. But for that stretch of almost a decade, the Hoofers were as much a symbol of Georgia’s earliest craft beer scene as anything that came out of a fermenter: the people behind the beer, out front, dancing a wagon down the street to sell it.