What is Four Peaks Oktoberfest?
A roast pig vanished from the first Tempe Oktoberfest, in a VFW hall on Apache Boulevard, in front of about two hundred people. It was a prank, it made the papers, and the evening still cleared roughly $800 for a brand-new civic group called Tempe Sister Cities. Half a century later the same group fills Tempe Beach Park with about 60,000 people over three October days, and the pig has been replaced by a brat-eating contest.
Four Peaks Oktoberfest is the Valley’s oldest and largest Oktoberfest and the primary fundraiser of Tempe Sister Cities, founded in 1970 by Dick and Jane Neuheisel with then-mayor Harry Mitchell. It began in the early 1970s as the Way Out West Oktoberfest to honor Regensburg, Tempe’s Bavarian sister city; the organization counted 2023 as its 50th anniversary and 2026 as the 53rd year. Proceeds have paid for more than 2,200 student exchange participants, mostly Tempe high schoolers spending a summer in one of nine sister cities, and a band of former Regensburg exchange students has flown in to play polka for about twenty years.
The presenting sponsor is Four Peaks Brewing Company, the Tempe brewery a mile east whose Oktoberfest lager pours next to imported German beer. The grounds hold stages of rock headliners with polka in between, German food vendors, a carnival, a kids’ zone, wiener dog races, stein-holding and the Saturday-morning Runnin’ for the Brats. In 2026 it ran October 9–11; Friday and Saturday cost $22 presale or $25 at the gate, anyone 20 and under was free, and Sunday was free for everyone.
For a Scottsdale visitor it is twenty minutes down the 101 and 202 and the best excuse of October to spend an evening on Tempe Town Lake.
How to do it
Pick the day for the crowd you want. Friday (5 p.m. to midnight) is the after-work party and the lightest headliner. Saturday (noon to midnight) is the big one: the run in the morning, the dog races and contests through the afternoon, the main headliner at night, and the longest beer lines of the weekend. Sunday (noon to 10 p.m.) is free, calm, family-heavy and the day locals actually go. Alcohol last call is 11:45 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7:45 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets. Buy presale; the gate price is $3 more and the Saturday gate line is real. Ages 20 and under are free all weekend (21-plus get a wristband and only they can buy beer), and volunteers get in free, which is how a lot of Tempe families have always done this. VIP Backstage, 21 and over, is worth it on Saturday night only: five drinks, food, a private bar and the front of the lakefront stage.
Getting there from Scottsdale. Loop 101 south to the 202 west, exit Scottsdale Road, which becomes Rural Road, south to Rio Salado Parkway, then west along the lake. Twenty minutes without traffic, thirty on a Saturday night. Park in the downtown Tempe garages off Mill Avenue and walk five minutes to the park; the park’s own lots are inside the footprint. Rideshare home is the only plan that survives two liters of Oktoberfest lager.
The rules. Cashless, clear-bag policy (12 by 6 by 12 inches), metal detectors at the gate, no backpacks, coolers, glass, folding chairs or umbrellas, no dogs except service animals and registered racers. Mid-October in Tempe is mid-80s at noon and 60s by 10 p.m.; bring a layer. The lake path east toward Hayden Butte is the escape when the stage gets loud. Eat the brats before the 7 p.m. set, when the lines are shortest, and read our breweries and beer note for the Four Peaks taproom a mile east.
A fundraiser in lederhosen
Oktoberfests in America are mostly marketing, and this one is honest about it. Tempe Sister Cities was founded in 1970 and signed its first sister city, Skopje in what is now North Macedonia, in 1971. When Regensburg, a medieval river town in Bavaria, joined the list, Dick and Jane Neuheisel went looking for a fundraiser that fit. A shopping trip in Vienna, where Jane was shown dirndls, produced the idea; the first Way Out West Oktoberfest followed at the old Veterans of Foreign Wars hall on Apache Boulevard, with about 200 guests and the famous missing pig. Jane Neuheisel chaired it for nearly thirty years. The organization dates the event to the early 1970s, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023 and called 2026 the 53rd year; those counts do not perfectly agree, so we give 1973 as the founding year with a shrug.
The festival moved whenever it outgrew its room and eventually arrived at Tempe Beach Park on the lake the city filled in 1999; Four Peaks Brewing, founded in 1996 in an old Tempe creamery, became presenting sponsor and gave it its name. The modern shape draws about 60,000 and takes 1,500 to 2,000 volunteers a year, a great deal of civic labor to send a few dozen teenagers to Regensburg and eight other sister cities each summer. The pandemic produced the only gaps, a virtual 2020 and a cancelled 2021. Pricing has crept from $16 presale in 2023 to $22 in 2026, with Sunday and the under-21 crowd still free, which is what keeps it a town festival rather than a beer-industry one.
Why it belongs on a Scottsdale calendar
Scottsdale has sister cities too, eight of them, and our Scottsdale Sister Cities note explains the quiet exchange program behind them. What Scottsdale has never had is a festival that turned the relationship into a civic ritual. Tempe did, by accident, with a pig and a hall on Apache Boulevard, and the result is the one October weekend when a college town’s lakefront belongs to families, exchange students in dirndls and a polka band from Regensburg. It is not Munich; it is the Valley’s longest-running proof that a fundraiser can also be a party. Go Sunday, bring the kids, and tip the band.