The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Oktoberfest started as Roberto Figini's answer to a feeling most perfumers wouldn't touch. The Bavarian festival is communal, loud, lubricated, and yet charged with something private. Roberto wanted to bottle that contradiction: the rowdy celebration that collapses into intimate conversation when the lights go low. Launched in 2026 under GRG Parfums, the composition opens with fizzy Pilsner and darker Dunkel beer accords, tangled with dusty saffron and licorice for a sweet-bitter edge. The beer accord is a beverage reference point, and the perfume takes that as license to push into unfamiliar territory.
What makes the composition worth paying attention to is the way Figini uses materials with very different weights. Beer accords are yeasty and fleeting, the kind of note that usually evaporates within minutes. Here they survive because saffron and licorice give them something to grip, anchoring that fizzy opening to a base that holds it in place. The middle layers in leather, agarwood, and ambergris, materials that bring smoke, animal warmth, and a salty depth that grounds the top notes. The transition happens fast.
The evolution
The first ten minutes belong entirely to beer. It foams up bright and slightly sour, carrying the yeasty, bready character of a freshly poured Pilsner. Licorice darkens it almost immediately, turning the foam grey, while saffron adds a thread of metallic gold that catches the light without ever sparkling. By the twenty-minute mark the beer is still detectable but no longer dominant. Leather arrives like someone sliding into the booth beside you, rich and slightly sweet, and the oud underneath gives it structural weight. Ambergris softens the edges, adding a salt-warm smoothness that makes the leather feel lived-in rather than new. The transition into the heart phase is quick, maybe forty-five minutes total before the composition settles. From the second hour onward, the drydown takes over. Tobacco comes forward, dry and slightly ashy, layered with bourbon vanilla's boozy sweetness. The deer musk underneath keeps everything close to skin, animalic without crossing into anything unwearable.
Cultural impact
Oktoberfest sits comfortably in GRG's catalog as one of the brand's more unusual conceits: a beer-led composition that treats a festival beverage as a legitimate top note. The fragrance wears closer to a boozy leather than a typical tobacco-vanilla entry, and the beer opening reads charming rather than gimmicky. On skin, the opening fizz lasts through the first half hour before the saffron and licorice take over, and within two hours the leather and agarwood have settled into a dry, smoky warmth that carries the bourbon vanilla underneath.
