Having consumed Fest Bier at Paulaner in Frankfurt, I cannot really enjoy any of the American Oktoberfest beers. They all seem heavy on the caramel, with the sweetness that goes with it.
Certainly not what they drink in the Fatherland.
This comment makes me cringe.
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Indeed.
It’s possible for there to be a good resulting beer that is made in a way that might not satisfy the brewer or beer geek in us. I have asked commercial brewers for countless recipes for Alts, Kolsch, Helles, Vienna, Pilsner, Festbier, etc. and when I saw the recipe I winced a little bit. But when I was at the brewery or bar or bowling alley or bocce court the beer was delicious. It’s possible for brewers to make the best out of what they have and I never checked the GB website for information about their Marzen. Personally, I would not use Caramunich in a Marzen but at the end of the day… good beer is good beer and we may have to form an opinion more about what the beer IS as opposed to what it’s not.
If beer drinkers are complaining to a brewer who is brewing to style that the beer they are brewing is not Octoberfest, then yes, they are complaining out of ignorance. Sierra Nevada received quite a bit of negative feedback that last year’s Octoberfest was not Octoberfest beer because it was not the sweet, caramelly mess that Americans have been led to believe is Märzen. Märzen is not an American beer style and Octoberfest is not an American event. Märzen is not even the primary beer style at Octoberfest and has not been for a long time. That is why the beer served today is called festbier. Acting out of a lack of knowledge is the very definition of ignorance. We have to remember that American’s thought that North American Industrial Lager (NAIL) was how beer was supposed to taste for a long time. A lot of Americans did not like the taste, so they did not drink beer, that is, until craft beers started to show up on shelves. Heck, I was primarily a wine and spirits drinker when I drank before I started to brew because I was not a fan of most NAILs.
I started to brew in the early nineties when American Märzen came into style. I am partly with Jeffy. The style is the result of using imported beer that was past its prime as a reference (Vienna suffered a somewhat similar fate via its association with Mexican brewers). However, it is also due to ignorance about ingredients, which in large part was due to lack of access to high quality ingredients. The North American brewing economy was radically different in the early 90s than it is today. The major industrial brewers controlled everything. The microbrewers, as they were called at the time, received what the industrial brewers did not want and the home brewing supply chain received what the microbrewers did not want. The first decent imported continental malt did not show up until the mid-nineties and when it did, it showed up in 50kg/110lbs bags. The maltster was DeWolf-Cosyns. George Fix pimped the heck out of that malt, but it was still 50% more expensive in bulk than domestic 2-row.
Most of the breweries, and I will use the word “brewery” loosely here, that brewed micro lager during the early days did so on the East Coast as the West Coast was busy with with American ale creations. The reason why I used the word brewery loosely here is that most of the micros that were producing lager were little more than labels at that point in time. Beer production was primarily handled by regional industrial lager breweries under contract. Samuel Adams was one the major players in the contract brewing world. Their early beer was brewed at the Pittsburgh Brewery Company, which was home to Iron City industrial lager. Other contract lagers were brewed by F.X. Matt such as New Amsterdam and Olde Heurich. F.X. Matt’s main beer was its Saranac industrial lager. Contract brewing breathed new life into regional industrial brewers who were fighting for their very existence due to consolidation. Hence, all of the beers that would establish the American Märzen style were formulated with malts commonly available to NAIL brewers, which were a far cry from the malts that were available to German and continental brewers. Jim Koch made a sales pitch about how his beer was all-malt and used imported Mittelfrüh and Tettnanger hops, but the reality is that North American brewers already used these hops, albeit in smaller quantities, because they were part of the North American industrial lager brewing supply chain. Almost all of the work performed by Al Haunold and his predecessors at USDA ARS Corvallis, Oregon was in an effort to replace the imported noble hops with “like” hops that had better agronomics when grown in the United States. All of that research was in large part funded by the large industrial brewers, mainly Anheuser-Busch. Anheuser-Busch eventually built Elk Mountain Farms in Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho near the Canadian border in order to obtain a peak photo period that was long enough to successfully grow landrace noble hops. Heck, even Willamette research was funded by Anheuser-Busch because they used Fuggle to finish Budweiser.
Or we could just make the beers that we like to drink.
And that is exactly what we do!
I touched on this in my last post. There are brewers, beer geeks (ahem… enthusiasts) and then there are everyday beer drinkers. We all have our idea of beer, our preferences, etc. You can say that a certain brewery’s approach to a style is not your thing… that’s your right. But you’re not allowed to tell others what to like. As beer people we have some amount of information regarding various styles so we might have a more detailed eye (and tastebuds). I have seen beers called a Kolsch where the hops are Nugget and Santiam and the yeast is 1056. I wince a little but because that’s not a kolsch but sure enough the beer itself was quite delicious. The brewery doesn’t need to hear from some homebrewer that they shouldn’t call their beer a kolsch and so I happily order another one and keep my mouth shut. American breweries often whiff mightily on German (and Czech) styles and we would have to quit our job to be able to comment on each and every one. Drink and brew what you like. Avoid what you dislike.
Exactly. If American brewers had originally decided to call their Fall beer “Sweet, Caramelly Mess” I don’t think it would have been a big mover. Instead they called it Oktoberfest, enough people were intrigued, and now they apparently have a big enough following that it is a highly anticipated release every year. Marzen, Oktoberfest, Festbier…it means nothing to the average beer drinker.
Maybe, every year, Sierra Nevada should release an American Oktoberfest and a German Festbier. The first to make money, the second to sleep at night.
Had a Sierra Nevada O-Fest yesterday. Alongside a Shiner O-fest. Did not care for either of them.
sacch, i personally hate this style, thanks for putting it into words. one of the worst craft beers ive had in the last year was some “october bock” type stuff - ~5.5%ABV, amber, incredibly sweet and just awful. it was a dumper, and i am very cheap.
while i understand the superfluous “people can drink what they want and brew what they like” comments, i have a beef with lame styles like this that stick around because we’ve had decades now of craft beer development. we should have jettisoned the lame crap.
however, as i think you may start to understand, people with excellent taste in and knowledge of beer are now the secondary if not last-place targets of most craft breweries. they want the mainstream, the people who won’t notice the decisions based in saving money and increasing profits or simply getting the most people drinking it. thats why everything is fruity and light now.
we are in fact entering a new dark era of craft brewing… and im not talking about stouts and porters.
I’ve toured Ayinger a couple times. They stock 4 malts for lagers. Pils, Munich, CaraMunich and Carafa. Of course they have Wheat malt for Wheatbiers, and Simar for color adjustment.
Their Oktoberfest is really good. They also have a Kirtabier for a local Fest. Tasted it side by side back in the USA with knowledgeable friends. We concluded that the CaraMunich was increased for Kirtabier.
Their beer is really good. Bought a keg (13.5 g) of their pilsner. That keg disappeared really fast!
Bought a 4 pack of the Oktoberfest. It was drinkable, but I will not buy it again. Certainly it would have tasted much better in a bar in Munich.
I must be missing something, because I do not understand what there is to have a beef about. Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. That simple.
I hate licorice, and so I do not buy it. Other people love it, and so they buy it. It would be silly if I ranted against licorice because I do not care for it.
So what about the American breweries that make really good “German style marzen”? Are we not talking about those?
I’m so confused.
its totally selfish on my part because i have beer tastes that are not trendy or common among the mainstream, but im saying that the market is flooded with garbage and the average person with an a college education does drink craft beer, but they do it with the same uncritical tastebuds that made people consume NAILs for decades.
as i’ve said repeatedly, there was a shift between the mid 2000s to early 2010s where selection of good and great beer (that i personally liked) was improving while simultaneously prices on average were increasing with some extreme high outlier prices popping up too ie. $25 750ml “special beer” bottles.
between the mid 2010s when all this fruity, sour and DDH crap started coming out shelf space for the beers i relied on has disappeared drastically while prices continued to climb hugely.
beer in 2021 is way overpriced and majorly crap. a problem unique to my location is that the govt beer and liquor stores (who regulate even what supermarkets can sell btw) decided to “support” ontario craft brewers, the problem is that they completely suck. they get a guaranteed govt shelf space and dont even try to make a decent product. the beer i can choose from is basically
- “cheap” imported german/polish/czech pale lager-pils-helles ($2.40 per 500ml can) - this is what i buy when i dont have any homebrew
- canadian average craft beer (very inconsistent, though i admit there are a few i find acceptable - $3.25 - $4 per 500ml can)
a. hazy IPAs
b. “cream ales”
c. session ales
d. craft lagers
e. fruit/sour crap
** noticing a pattern? -max IBU 35, all pale, “approachable”** - canadian “premium” craft - same as above but add DDH, higher abv DIPAs, and higher price.
- very small choice of american IPAs basically founders all-day, voodoo ranger and SNPA. thats it. ($3.45+ per 500ml)
- volatile selection of about 4 different english bitters, often simply sold out, and it gets boring drinking these ones over and over again. theyre nothing special. ($2.50)
- NAILs and discount beer (still minimum $2 per 500ml)
- macro “premium” - heineken/carlsberg/guinness/etc
unibroue is mysteriously gone from ontario shelf spaces, you cant get it other than fin du monde, and that is hard to find and expensive (edit: sapporo in fact does have a share in the beerstore corp.)
i know people here seem to get upset when i am very critical of the beer industry, but i have the right to do so (despite the fact that im shouting alone in the dark here) and the situation is really grim here when it used to be really good.
Yes, let’s talk about those. Which breweries come to mind? And, is Marzen a prolific style of beer in Germany? I do not recall seeing any on the store shelves, having spent a lot of time in Frankfurt, Munich, and Mainz.
Here locally I get Prost and Bierstadt which do it well but there are places like Odell and even my neighborhood brewery that do it well. Weldwerks was delicious the other day along with lefthand and some others. All depend on where you live and what’s available to you I guess.
I prefer festbier to marzen but you don’t see a lot of those around here.
An updated Designing Great Beers seems like a waste of time. Imagine you started in 2015(ish), by the time you publish here comes brut IPA, pastry stout, milkshake IPA, cryo hops, & craft malt. Market seems to be changing too quickly to be useful.
I think of the whole Märzen thing like lutefisk, or Irish red ale. From the people I’ve talked to, nobody in Scandinavia eats lutefisk anymore. For some families in Minnesota though it’s a whole big thing. Märzen is the same, it’s a German American tradition, not a German one.
I agree. Just waiting for the next Hyper-Triple Rooty-Fruity IPA.