Paulaner Oktoberfest Marzen

Do I really need to mention Oktoberfest and its German roots? The annual celebration in Munich, with the Big Six breweries hoisting gigantic tents for two weeks starting in mid-September, creating a carnival atmosphere, and charging an awful lot of money for liters of the festival beer, represents everything positive — and quite a bit of the negative — about beer.

But we will have none of that. Here, every German beer bar (and an unhealthy number of non-German ones) do their own mini-Oktoberfest. The German bars tend to bring out as many of those Big Six breweries’ Oktoberfest beers, and in celebration, I present Paulaner’s Oktoberfest this week.

In case you were curious, the Big Six breweries in Munich, the ones that get all the press and, well, virtually every drop of beer sold in the city: Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr (bought by Paulaner, but still independent), Hofbrau, Augustiner, Spaten, and Lowenbrau (merged with Lowenbrau and both now owned by Interbrew), all umlauts omitted, sorry. I’m sure you recognize a few if not all of these, but they all produce a similar lineup of beer, and a similar beer for Oktoberfest. And it’s probably not the same beer labeled Oktoberfest for export.

As the name of this beer implies, this Oktoberfest is brewed in the true Marzen style, complete with the deep amber color, Munich (or Vienna) malt aroma and flavor, a fuller mouthfeel than your average lager, and a bit more alcohol for the festivities. All great Oktoberfestbier as a style shares these qualities, so let’s hope one of the oldest, most famous of the German breweries pulls it off in the bottles I’ve purchased –Paulaner has been brewing for about 475 years, but this particular style only came to be around 1870. I think they’ve had enough time to figure it out.

The bottles are marked “Best Before 7/12”, which might mean December 7 but I’m thinking they’re really giving me a year from the bottling date. The Oktoberfest Marzen pours a brilliantly clear, deep amber. But a funny thing happens: the head fizzes and dissipates like soda, instead of staying put and looking like, well, beer. Often this means a serious infection, which would cause massive off-flavors. A big whiff relieves me of that notion, fortunately: a nice concoction of the toasted-sugar, cookie-dough I’ve come to expect from the better Oktoberfests, plus a bit of malt graininess, with the slightest sour note, which I freely admit could just by my mind expecting that given the pour. I brought forth a second bottle to see if the sad head issue affected just one bottle; I was wrong. But I managed to kick up a bit more head, a beige finger or two of foam that didn’t hang out particularly long.

The taste is curiously flatly malty, a little of that cookie dough and breadiness that marks the style (again), but something a little… less. It’s not at all fruity, so again, can stop worrying about a terrible infection. It’s clean except for that weirdness with the aggressive lack of head retention. But it’s also rather a thin beer, especially for a style that depends on the maltiness.

I think we’ll just call this a “caveat emptor” moment. I’ve definitely had better Paulaner Oktoberfest — I even had a very good draft version earlier this week — so, if this is the new export version, then I’m disappointed. Otherwise, I’ll chalk it up to a bad batch. Is it worth shelling out the $8.99 I paid at Whole Foods? Maybe not, at least the rest of this year. Find the Spaten Oktoberfest, which I’ve never had a problem with, or try an American version on for size from a brewery that knows German styles fairly well (Victory Festbier, Stoudt’s, Blue Point, Brooklyn…). If you do try it, I’d recommend buying from some other store’s stock, like New Beer around the corner from Whole Foods Bowery, Bierkraft or Thrifty Beverage in Brooklyn, or your local decent beer store. There are a lot of choices this time of year, so grab something Festy and celebrate!