Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest collaboration – Bitburger

I like the Bitburger portfolio of beers, so will give this a try. But it seems like a strange collaboration choice.

 

OK, was ist Fernsehenbier? Ah haa ha, nevermind.... TV beer.

 

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I'm not familiar with the Bitburger Braugruppe beers but I can attest to the fact that not all German beers are of the best quality; they have plenty of lower tier priced beers. I've been calling them bahnhof beers but fernsehbier makes just as much sense.

As to why Sierra Nevada would collaborate with them I'm not sure. Perhaps it has to do with wider distribution in Germany and Europe?

 

Or perhaps it has to do with better name recognition in the US. Not many many in the U.S. are familiar with names like Mahrs or Riegele.

 

Last figures I saw (2017) had the Bitburger Group the third largest brewing company in Germany:

# 1 The Radeberger Group (Radeberger, Jever, DAB, Berliner Pilsener)
10.8 million hectoliters
# 2 Anheuser-Busch InBev (Becks, Diebels, Hasseröder, Franziskaner and Löwenbräu and others)
6.6 million hectoliters
# 3 The Bitburger Brewery Group (also Köstritzer, Licher and Wernesgrüner) -
6.3 million hectoliters

(Total for entire country - 85 million hectoliters of beer in 2017.
If one adds the production of non-alcoholic beers, the total sales volume is 101 million hectoliters.)

 

I'm confused, what does a hefeweizen have to do with an Octoberfest beer?
I'm puzzled by the Bitburger collaboration, but hefeweizen has nothing to do with my confusion

 

This would be a bizarre move. Bitburger is a pure pilsner brewery, has limited connections to any hefeweizen brewer (my go to brand Licher added hefeweizen years ago, but it's simply a crutch for their contract-tied gastronomy), and having anything to do with Oktoberfest would be almost unheard of within Germany. The only reason would be non-Euro distro channels, even then it's a "jump the shark" moment.

 

Big long thread here with the question answered by SierraTerence toward the last pages.

As was said in the thread linked above, maybe SN is going to show Bitburger how to make an Oktoberfest.

Here's a direct link to the "announcement."

 

Where did I miss some connection to a Hefeweizen? The collab is for an Oktoberfest, as far as I know.

 

Maybe over there...