For showing up at the end of the calendar year, autumn is an ironically fertile season for new beginnings. Kids start school. Farmers celebrate a new harvest. The Jews celebrate a new year. I celebrate a new reason to hate people who complain about summer.
This year, during one of those infamous Labor Day picnics where millions of Americans across the country, instead of mourning the loss of joy cast over mankind through the brilliance of summer’s sun, blaspheme her holy name by proclaiming autumn to be the greatest of the seasons, a friend of mine poured lemon juice on the open wound by declaring that we should all state our Autumnal Resolutions.
For those of you who feel like you might have missed a memo, fear not. Autumnal Resolutions have never been an American tradition and, God-willing, they never will be. After all, there is very little to which autumn calls us to resolve, except maybe to sleep all day and stay home until sometime in May. But I generally like to surround myself with people who don’t grasp these obvious facts as easily as I do, because if there’s one thing more important than determining which season is the best, it’s making sure that when all’s said and done, I’m still the smartest person in the room.
This intelligence gap, however, meant that I was outnumbered and would indeed have to suffer through the lukewarm aspirations of those who are lesser than I. And if there’s one thing more important than making sure that I’m the smartest person in the room, it’s making sure that I’ve got the cleverest aspiration so that people will still think I’m cool, even when I disagree with the principle.
Unlike most people who make resolutions, I like to set a low bar. There’s no sense in dreaming up the impossible or even the improbable, because then you just have to tell everybody you failed. And nobody likes a failure. And life, of course, is all about how many people like you.
With a nil level of challenge set for myself, I declared that my Autumnal Resolution was to drink as much seasonal beer as possible. And for all of you ale connoisseurs out there who like to talk about hops and spices and malts instead of important things, like wondering what hops are in the first place, don’t expect an academic breakdown of sensations here. When I say the bar is low, I mean there are field mice that would struggle to pass underneath it. I don’t intend to seek out the scarcest or the most authentic autumn ales, mostly because drinking beer shouldn’t be that challenging, I don’t care what season it is. More importantly, my elementary appraisal of mostly bottled beers serves the greater purpose of challenging the rising belief that drinking beer is a classy thing to do. As fraternities and rednecks demonstrate ad nauseam, drinking beer is not classy. Drinking scotch is classy. Drinking beer is just fun.
What my friends in the park didn’t know about my lowball resolution amidst their jeering was that my mission was, in fact, already underway by the time I thought of it. Sometime in late August I saw that the first autumn ale of the season had quietly slipped its way onto the shelf at my local C-Town. That moment is always one of mixed emotions for me; excitement over the beer, but utter devastation at what it signals. And when utter devastation rears its merciless form, I frequently find that buying beer is one of the best things to do. Thus commenced the JC Oktoberfest of 2010.
My first taste of fall this year was Blue Moon’s Harvest Moon. Blue Moon always makes a very distinct seasonal ale, uniquely different from the others, and their fall beer is no exception. Harvest Moon has a more intelligent balance than most pumpkin ales, offering the fullness of pumpkin flavor without the overpowering richness of brown sugar that has so many other pumpkin ales thickening my tongue and inducing massive sugar headaches later on. Though ultimately still on the sweet side, Harvest Moon is a well-rounded beer worthy of opening the fall season, if for no other reason than because their brand strategy of naming beer after the moon cycles is really cool.
When push comes to shove, though, I don’t really care for pumpkin ales. The complexities too often turn to riches, which leave me feeling more sick than satisfied. So I drank the Harvest Moon as quickly as I could, anticipating my next stop on the autumn beer tour. Leaving my fortunes to the distributors, I next ended up with Sierra Nevada’s Tumbler, described as an autumn brown ale, though it should probably be labeled an Oktoberfest. This beer makes an uncommon departure from Sierra’s typical heavy-on-the-hops approach, going the traditional autumnal route instead of fresh-roasted malts, leaving less of the bite while hinting at smoke and chocolate. Best of all, Tumbler goes down smoother than other Sierras, which means you can drink them really fast in the interest of moving on to the next fall brew on the shelf. After all, the autumn ale season is about quantity, not quality.
The cornerstone of any fall beer, of course, is the Oktoberfest. The real Oktoberfest started as a horse race in Munich commemorating a royal marriage in the year 1810, during which time a special brew by Spaten was served en masse to the people. The Germans quickly realized that beer was far more interesting and enjoyable than horses or royalty, and so the festival continued annually as a beer fest, inspiring copycats the world round. At such festivals, Spaten’s Oktoberfest is still served in liter-sized mugs, blonde waitresses wear pigtails and the classic St. Pauli Girl corset, and the only thing on the menu is bratwurst. This is what Oktoberfest means to serious beer-drinkers and Germans. However, as I am neither, I’ll talk instead about the festival’s global offshoot: the Oktoberfest brew.
The majority of autumnal ales in America are classified as “Oktoberfest” ales, but I’m pretty sure that very few people know what that really means. We just like the name. And the “k” in “Oktober.” But there’s more to these brews than aesthetically-pleasing misspellings. Oktoberfest seasonals are, unequivocally, the finest beers out there. They make up the sole reason to look forward to the doldrums of fall (that, and pipe-smoking, but that’s for another article altogether). From Blue Point to Sam Adams to Magic Hat, each Oktoberfest is slightly different from its cousins, but they all share similar characteristics: caramel, toffee, heavy malts, hints of hops, and a robust amber color I’m convinced is designed to make me feel like I’m drinking the dead leaves right off of the ground. By nature of the ingredients, Oktoberfests almost always turn out to be the smoothest, most drinkable beers, and as a result, they also almost always lead to late mornings and the distinct impression that fall went by awfully quickly, without leaving much trace of memory. This, I’m assuming, more than seasonal characteristics, is why Oktoberfest is only brewed once a year.
Last year, I remember settling on Blue Point as the superior autumnal ale of 2009, but the jury is still out for 2010. Sam Adams always holds its own as a top contender, but then so do the locals, such as Brooklyn Brewery’s Oktoberfest and Post Road Pumpkin Ale. (Surely there are some tasty local beers wherever you live, too, even if Brooklyn’s are better.) Also not to be ignored is Victory’s Festbier, which humbly foregoes the title Oktoberfest, but brings with it all of the characteristics you’d expect from something effectively called “party beer.” For those of you who, after reading this far, still think drinking beer is classy, I recommend the earthier, more subtle brews offered by Hacker-Pschorr and Ayinger on tap (pass on the bottles) at your friendly neighborhood biergarten. And whether on tap or in bottles, you can rarely go wrong with the pioneer of all things Oktoberfest: Spaten.
But care must also be exercised when sojourning through the world of autumn ales, for there are impostors out there as well. Hofbrau, for example, seems like it should be a pretty authentic contender, but their Oktoberfest comes out more watery than expected, hitting the palate like a pilsner, and a boring one at that, shamelessly blaspheming the holy name of Oktoberfest that it bears. And of course, there’s the laughable contribution from Michelob, which should be outlawed in the very Constitution of the United States. If you venture to drink this, be ready for people to laugh at you, or worse, block you on a social networking site. They won’t be joking, and they won’t be your friends anymore, either. (And remember how important it is to be liked by people.) Responsible drinking means remembering this even when you’ve already had a few and that Michelob is whispering, “Why not?” to your uninhibited ears. Just as you intuitively know not to wear your underwear for more than three days in a row, you should also know not to seriously regard Michelob as a true Oktoberfest beer. Some things are just inherently wrong.
By the time you read this article, the season will be half over. That means you’ll only get to have half the fun I’ll have had by now, but that’s to be expected, since people generally only ever have half as much fun as I do. But don’t let my superiority complex rain on your parade; October still has plenty of beer to go around. Contrary to the example set above, I don’t recommend beer-drinking as an Autumnal Resolution, mostly because I don’t recommend Autumnal Resolutions at all. But if you find that you absolutely must commit to something during this season where all the life around us is dying, then ale is surely the thing, not because fall doesn’t offer anything else to celebrate, but because none of those other things offer clever marketing schemes or an alcohol content higher than 5.5% ABV. And alcohol content is, after all, the most important ingredient for any new beginning.