Held each year in March, Wurstfest has become one of Hermann’s best-loved festivals, as well as a prestigious showcase for sausage makers from around the state

It all began in January of 1979 when Betty Talyor-Yeddis, owner of Hermann’s Calico Cupboard Restaurant, set out to purchase bratwurst from Loutre Market. Crossing the bridge, she realized how lucky she was to have seven quality sausage makers in the area.

Taylor-Yeddis decided that a sausage festival would be just the thing to chase away the winter doldrums and kick off the tourist season. Two months later, more than 1,200 people attended Hermann’s first Wurstfest.

Participants were asked to donate $2.50 to River Bluff Industries, the local sheltered workshop, before taking a tour of five Hermann kitchens where they could sample sausage dishes. Restaurants added special items to their menus, wineries offered tours and tastings, and there were sausage-making equipment displays and demonstrations.

The Rhineland Wurstjaeger Dancers, a traditional German folk group established in 1948, dusted off their costumes and performed, as they have continued to do every year since.

A few years later, after Taylor-Yeddis left town, the Hermann Chamber of Commerce asked Betty Held of Stone Hill Winery to head the event.

"It was too good of a festival to just let it die," says Held. "I wanted this to be a community effort, and I knew I needed an expert sausage maker and some influential people on the committee to make that happen."

She turned to Dick Hudson, Ruth Cramer of the Wurstjaeger Dancers, John Bartel, who would later become Hermann's mayor, and veteran sausage maker Bill Sloan, owner of Swiss Meat and Sausage Company.

"It was apparent that if this was going to become a prestigious event we had to have very high standards " says Bartel. "That meant standardizing the format by writing rules and regulations and fielding a panel of qualified judges to oversee the competition.”

Bartel, sausage maker Norv Kampschroeder of Washington, Missouri, and Professor Don Nauman of the University of Missouri-Columbia, went to work. A perfect sausage, they determined, would start with 200 points. Judges would then deduct points based on external appearance (20 percent), internal appearance (20 percent) and edibility (60 percent). Edibility would encompass taste, flavor, texture and aroma.

Introduced in 1986, the new format proved successful. Festival attendance doubled the following year. As the event's popularity soared, so did the number of professional entries.

"It took a couple of years to get the rules refined," says Bartel. "It was primarily an amateur competition. Then we started campaigning hard throughout the state for entries from commercial sausage makers."

By 1988 the Jaycee Hall at the City Park was no longer big enough to host the judging, so the competition was moved to the Hermannhof Festhalle. The following year professional sausage makers were invited to sell their products. In 1990 admission to the exhibits was charged for the first time. An amateur winemaker's competition was added in 1994 followed by the first Wiener Dog Derby in 1996 and an amateur beer-making competition in 1997.

Today, thousands of visitors make an annual pilgrimage to the little town on the Missouri River for the “Best of the Wurst.”