German / Imported Märzens

I just use a really aggressive pour.

 

This would be more appropriate in the "American" thread, but I figured any decent interest in this beer is due to the involvement of Spaten. It's been a long time since I feel like I've been mean about a beer on these forums. I really disliked this beer.

For me, the main issue is the lagering in foeders. I don't like lagers dominated by oak. This beer suffers from this. Keeping in mind that everyone's taste is different, I still have a hard time understanding a brewer's desire for this. The oak in this beer feels like an over-salted food. Trying to look beyond that, it's got a really odd fruitiness to it also.

Taking this beer on its own terms, I found it to be unpleasant. It's not an easy drinker. Compared to other Oktoberfest-style beers it feels like a train wreck. Someone else might love it.

The Steven Harrington art feels like a strange choice. The blue ring has three things written in it: Blue Point, Spaten, and "roggenfest." A few other breweries have used this word. It's been used for an Oktoberfest-style lager made with rye, a Festbier version of a Roggenbier, and a top-fermented "Roggenbier/Marzenbier hybrid" (I'm using the brewer's words within the quotes for that last one). This Blue Point beer is a lager with rye. Of the beers using that word, I'm guessing that the one with the most presence before this year is Flagship's Roggenfest. Flagship isn't too far away from Blue Point's NY home. There's also a Blue Point beer on Untappd called "Roggenfest" that was a "rye marzen" that appears to have been draft only from this summer. It seems like that particular beer is listed on BA with the name "Roggenbier" instead. ABV is listed as a little different from Zumfest. Perhaps this was a different beer... or an early version before it was reworked and went into a higher level of production. Maybe the earlier beer was simply a Roggenbier as the name here suggests. Or maybe they are the same beer and they changed the name after seeing the beer in Flagship's portfolio.

@jesskidden , everything about this beer is confusing... but I'm guessing that their standard "Oktoberfest" beer is seen as their true seasonal and Zumfest is a freakish one-off.

Besides some of those "Roggenfest" beers mentioned above, Great Divide's Hoss and Industrial Arts' 2018 edition of Autumn Landscape are/were two others.

@TongoRad

 

Follow up to the above:

I just noticed that @JackHorzempa posted about a Devils Backbone beer in the NBW thread. The beer is called München On Hops and the label states "Bavarian IPA". Here was the brewer's description:

I guess AB-InBev is making sure that those Spaten brewers are making the rounds this Oktoberfest season for multiple craft-ish takes. For anyone who missed it, the below is the brewer's description of the Blue Point beer:

 

Jack's Abby also made a rye-marzen-something, which was slightly less insanely good as the Individual Arts beer. Too bad about this one.

 

I thought it was oddly fruity in a way that I assumed was coming from the hops rather than fermentation. I didn't have a more specific flavor in mind, but orange is certainly one that I wouldn't rule out. The oak dominated for me. With regards to the Sierra Nevada O-fest (which I also thought was oddly fruity), the first time I had the beer, I wasn't thinking orange, I was thinking herbal. With each SN beer after the first, the orange became louder and louder... so I was fixating on one aspect to it and that resulted in it becoming amplified. I could imagine the same thing happening with repeat experiences with the Blue Point beer... but I'm not going to go there.

 

I thought this video was pretty neat, purporting to show Oktoberfest anno 1929. At 5:12 you see a server filling mugs with beer from two different casks, dunkel to the right and helles to the left. The server proclaims "ein ganz prima Wiesnmass" when filling a mug with the "helles". The beer waggons in the beginning of the video have casks that are shown to be marked with either M or H, I take that to mean Märzen or Helles.

 

It sure gets one in the mood for some beer drinking.

 

How can you tell?

Have you ever seen casks marked for beer type in this way before? In that location and so decoratively? You could be right of course but it seems strange. I've only ever seen that space used for brewer/brand recognition and things of that nature... but in later years.

 

From the conversation between the waitresses and the beer tapper/server, they ask for either dunkel or hell and he acknowledges their order.

I think the branded ends came later, this is more old school, similar to how they would use chalk to write on the sides of wooden storage barrels down in the cellars. I imagine it was an easy way to distinguish between different beers filled in identical vessels (barrels). But I'll grant you that this is my interpretation of it, albeit one which I feel pretty confident about.

See for example the barrels shown at 2:47 in the video below from 1956.

 

Here's another video from 1949 (at 0:10).

 

Nice finds. Thanks.

 

Yeah. I forgot about the Industrial. @TongoRad sent me one of those. That was a really good beer. A much better premise than this one sounds.

 

Concerning the earlier debate about bottling dates I thought it was nice to see this year's Paulaner having a julian date indicating it was bottled on August 2nd. The beer itself is quite nice, the freshness is apparent in aroma and flavor and it has a strong pale malt flavor and some mild refreshing hop flavor and bitterness. There's no real sweetness to speak of and the beer finishes dry. It has been several years since I last had this beer, it went missing from the yearly Oktoberfest release, but I remembered it being lighter and drier than the other Munich Oktoberfest beers (that we get) and that still holds true. To me the Löwenbräu is the richest and the sweetest, and the hoppiest of the ones I've had, Spaten and Hofbräu come second, and Paulaner is on the lighter and drier end of the spectrum. It's still a beer with some heft to it though with the gravity it's brewed at.

The new bottle is nice looking as well.

 

Until I watched it I thought you meant filling one mug with both dunkel and helles, which I actually want to try that now.

And I want one of those hats with the big feather.

 

Poor phrasing on my part, I meant to highlight that back then there wasn't simply one kind of beer served at the Oktoberfest, which is also why the barrels needed to be marked no doubt.

 

Um. It's a boar's or badger tail brush. Don't be that tourist.

 

Well that explains why I can't find them online. Thanks! I'll adjust my search accordingly.