New Beer Brewday: Hoptoberfest

I'm starting to get really pumped up about brewing a bunch of new beers again. For a while, it seemed like we just kept brewing the same things over and over (Which looking back, really isn't far from the truth ever since we released our new core beers and seasonals). Now, it seems like we have nothing. But new beers coming up and not enough of our core beers to go around. Today, we are brewing 60 barrels of a beer that hadn't even been discussed at the brewery until last Friday... Hoptoberfest.

To be honest, I'm not sure if this beer started out as a joke or not. The way it works for me when I'm coming up with a new beer is not to brainstorm a bunch of beers that I'd like to brew, but rather to blurt out whenever a new beer comes to mind. Typically this happens pretty spontaneously without any reason that the thought crosses my mind. So last week as we were brewing our Oktoberfest and the brewery was a little too quiet, I turned to Mike and said that I thought we should brew the same basic beer, but with a ton of hops and call it Hoptoberfest next year. I got the typical non-committal "I like it." response that I typically get when these situations pop up.

Then we got to yesterday... We were planning on prepping to brew our last batch of Oktoberfest for the year when we realized that the batch wouldn't be ready until the first week of October... Too late to release 60 barrels of an Oktoberfest. We had thought for a moment that we would just skip the Brewday and gradually we would use all the ingredients in other beers. It wasn't until after deciding to skip today's brew day that we realized we had the opportunity to brew the Hoptoberfest a year sooner than we had discussed just four days previously. In a happy twist of fate, we realized that we had the perfect hops for the beer...

Due to a few upcoming beers, we needed to order some new hops and the suppliers needed for us to buy very large quantities all at once in order to be able to purchase the necessary varieties. This lead us to having an abundance of Citra and a newer, very hard to find hop varietal from Germany: Mandarina Bavaria. Mandarina Bavaria is notable for being a German hop varietal that has many of the qualities that American brewers desire in IPA's. It has a very distinctive mandarin orange flavor and aroma, that would normally be absent from hops grown in Europe where the common hop flavors are grassy, spicy, and lightly floral, but rarely fruity, tropical, or citrusy.

So that brings us the main hop component of our Hoptoberfest; a lager brewed with the same malt base and yeast as our traditional style German Oktoberfest, but utilizes enough hops in the boil to be on par with the extreme hoppy IPA's of the U.S. breweries, dry hopped twice with Citra and Mandarina Bavaria, and lagered for just as long as any of our other lagers to create a crisp, clean, refreshing finish. Be on the lookout for it in the first week of October in bombers!