I got to brew my favorite beer with the homebrew club this past Saturday — the fabled Märzen bier of Bavaria. We spent around nine or ten hours brewing, then about two weeks fermenting, and then nearly six months lagering. As a club we did 90 gallons, and I’ve taken five home.
“Six months!?!?!” you ask? That’s right, we won’t be drinking this beer until Oktoberfest at the end of September.
The name Märzen itself comes from the German for March, and has been used for centuries to refer to beer brewed at a high original gravity at the end of the brewing season. Beer was usually not brewed during the heat of the summer. They were generally intended to last through the hot months without spoiling, and were stored in caves near lakes that would freeze during winter, allowing the cave to be easily stocked with ice to maintain a cool temperature. Traditionally, these Märzens were high gravity beers.
The beer we know as a Märzen today was influenced by the Vienna Lagers first produced in Austria in the middle of the 19th Century. Anton Dreher studied brewing in Munich with Gabriel Sedlmayr — who was part of the Spaten brewing dynasty in Munich during the 19th Century. In 1841, a year before the invention of the original Pilsner, Dreher brought lager yeast back to Vienna and began using it to make a Viennese Märzen style beer that has become the Vienna Lager we know today. Eventually, Sedlmayr’s sons Gabriel the second, and Josef brewed a copy of Dreher’s Vienna Lager with a more Bavarian approach to the malt bill and the Oktoberfest Märzen was born. It remains a higher gravity beer. It’s a beer we drink to celebrate.
Bottles of Oktoberfest Märzen usually feature checkered blue and white patterns somewhere on the bottle in reference to the Bavarian flag. You might also see horses on the bottle, because Oktoberfest historically featured a horse race.
What makes this beer so interesting to me is that it doesn’t taste like any of the beers I cut my beer tasting teeth on. It’s focused far more on the malt character than it is on the hop flavor most americans have come to associate with good beer. Beyond that, it’s beer you generally have to wait for; and that waiting definitely makes it special – not your workaday beer. There’s an old proverb that says “hunger is the best sauce.” Additionally, the long lagering time tends to result in an exceptionally clean beer, both in flavor and appearance.
So I’ve been monitoring the temperature of the room I’m fermenting in, and when I stop seeing action I’ll move the beer to a secondary fermenter and put it in the fridge to store until sometime toward the end of September. Good things come to those who wait, no?
I’ll update you on how this all turns out in September.
Tags: German Lager, Lagering, March Brewing, Märzen, Oktoberfest