Tanked
Written: Sep 08 '00 (Updated Sep 08 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Possibly the best American-made festbier
Cons: Oh, so hard to get it to that point...
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| beerfly's Full Review: Victory Vodka |
Time tells.
The very first beer Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski brewed at Victory Brewing Co. was their Festbier. They brewed it during a snowstorm, the Big One in January of 1996. Plenty of time to do the decoction while the snow fell, plenty of time to care for each drop. I visited Victory for the first time during the frightening thaw of that snow, when the parking lot at Victory ran a foot and a half deep with muddy meltwater and I had to sneak around a roadblock through a truck terminal to get to the brewery. We drank coffee and looked at the equipment, and talked about festbier.
Festbier, oktoberfestbier, Märzen, whatever you call it, is all about malt, and wringing the most from it, maybe even more than a doublebock does. D-bocks are huge, and can cover flaws with power. Festbiers are hanging out there, no huge power, no big hops, no cover from carbonation like lighter beers get. They're naked, vulnerable, the brewer's skill laid out on a plate.
Maybe that's why I've been so disappointed with American-brewed festbiers. I've had the vaunted west coast examples: Bleh. I've had the (mostly ale-brewed) best from New England. Eh. And I've had the best from my beloved LagerLand, the Mid-Atlantic... well, better, but not there. Not even Victory's. The Germans have it down: Paulaner, Spaten, Ayinger, Hacker-Pschorr. Their fests ring with the malt character homebrewers call "toasty" and the more geeky of them tag knowingly as "melanoidins," the highly modified carbs that make that indefinable "juiciness" that festbiers have.
What's missing? Wouldn't we like to know? American microbrewers use German malts, German yeasts, German techniques, and still.... Eh.
Victory may have found it. My wife's family had one of their occasional reunions over Labor Day. I naturally got tagged to supply the beer, and for the first two days we drank from a seemingly bottomless 56 qt. cooler I had brought (okay, I also brought two cases and kept feeding them in from the bottom!); PA beers, New England beers, some imports, stuff from my beer fridge. Then on the actual day of the reunion picnic, I trotted out a 1/4 keg of Victory Festbier, a party beer everyone could drink without worrying about geeks vs. mainstreamers. I was expecting the usual good, but not great beer.
Then I tapped that first glass. It was double-take good, surprisingly, shockingly better. How? Well, first you've got the amber color, with its slight burnt orange tinge: normal. Then there was the parchment-colored head, not really abundant, but sufficient: normal. But the smell, there was a rich malt smell (what's malt smell like? Huh. Like rich bread, only sweeter, but not candy-sweet, more like cornpone sweet) that filled my nose: not normal.
And the taste, the feel... Slippery, sliding over the tongue like oil, full and chewy, and juicy, that ineffable sensation of a liquid that just drips with refreshment, something that sets the salivary glands gushing and squeezing... Like liquid cookies, like fresh, moist bread, and a finish that grabbed me gently by the ear and said "I'm not a finish... I'm a beginning. Let's go, big fella, have another." So I did.
Today, I found out what happened. I took the keg back to the brewery, tracked down Covaleski and asked him why the Festbier was so much better. "Tank time," he said. Because of a screw-up in the brewing schedule, this particular batch of festbier was left in the tank for 4 months rather than the usual 6 weeks. He was pleased that I'd noticed the difference.
Me, I was left bereft. Obviously they couldn't afford to put every batch of this year-round staple in the tank for 4 months. Then I had the lightbulb: "Hey, Bill... Why don't you make this mistake every May, and bring out a special batch of over-aged Festbier just in time for O-fest season?" He smiled and said they were already thinking of that. Genius.
So I'm planning on getting as much Festbier as I can over the next three weeks or so, till the WonderBatch runs out. Then I'll wait till next fall with my tongue hanging out.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
beerfly
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Member: Lew Bryson
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Reviews written: 88
Trusted by: 82 members
About Me:
One bourbon, one Scotch, one beer, eh? I'll take Kentucky Spirit, Scapa, and HopDevil.
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