From September to November, a sure beer type begins to fill cabinets, faucet menus and Instagram feeds throughout the nation—and I’m not speaking about pumpkin beer. Oktoberfest is in every single place. However for a beer with such ubiquity, few can agree on what it even is. 

Barring its more moderen postmodern period, beer has lengthy been ruled by types. Phrases like pale ale, porter or doppelbock are shorthand for understanding the profile and course of behind any given beer. However with regards to Oktoberfest, there’s an unlimited taste spectrum that the moniker might entail. 

“There are a number of fashion interpretations you would possibly discover below an ‘Oktoberfest’ label, significantly in the USA,” says Brian Grossman, head brewer at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Ashleigh Carter, head brewer and co-owner at Denver’s Bierstadt Lagerhaus, agrees. “I don’t suppose the phrase ‘Oktoberfest’ can inform you precisely what it’s. It’s divided into camps: festbier and märzen.”

Märzen has loved the Oktoberfest affiliation for longer. It’s a centuries-old German type historically made in spring, cellared and consumed via hotter months, and completed within the fall. That timeline made it a go-to for the primary Oktoberfest celebration in 1810. It remained the Oktoberfest staple till 1990, when many German breweries switched to lighter festbiers.

“They started experimenting with lighter lagers as a response to shifting tendencies in beer and to align with the modern brewing practices and shopper preferences of the time,” says Katherine Benecke, licensed Cicerone and normal supervisor at New York’s Treadwell Park. “They had been additionally cheaper to provide and faster to brew.” 

Plus, as a lighter type, festbiers go down so much simpler at an occasion centered round guzzling as a lot beer as attainable. Orangey-amber märzens are heavier and richer, typically brewed with malts like Vienna and Munich, imparting graham cracker, caramel, toffee and biscuit notes. They’re additionally barely stronger, ABV-wise. Festbiers, in the meantime, are golden-straw, grainy-sweet and easy-drinking. 

Order an Oktoberfest on the official competition in Munich, and also you’ll be met with that mild festbier. However within the States, Oktoberfests are nonetheless extra generally märzens. 

Living proof: Brooklyn’s KCBC’s annual Zøktoberfest launch is a märzen. Co-founder Zack Kinney says the beer, which he was homebrewing earlier than the brewery opened in 2016, was born by “following within the footsteps of what I noticed American craft brewers doing on the time.” Certainly, older craft breweries like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada have lengthy made märzens as their Oktoberfests, solidifying the hyperlink between the biscuity beer and the autumn season. Bierstadt and Cleveland’s Nice Lakes Brewing Co. additionally nonetheless honor the märzen path. 

“We do what I’d think about the extra conventional Oktoberfest,” says Nice Lakes model coordinator Michael Williams. “We’ve been round since 1998, and that’s the best way most American craft breweries [have] rolled with it.”

However the various types don’t neatly adhere to an American-European divide. Festbiers are more and more cropping up below the Oktoberfest moniker at American breweries, too, which Carter attributes to extra folks experiencing Oktoberfest firsthand, higher beer schooling and a rising, diversifying curiosity in lagers—why follow märzen when you possibly can add festbier to your lineup and reveal the nuances of lagers? 

Actually, KCBC just lately added a festbier to its Oktoberfest-timed choices; in New Orleans, Brieux Carré likewise makes each a conventional märzen and a festbier. Head brewer Charles Corridor says they profit from being a taproom-focused brewery, the place workers can clarify variations to friends as they struggle each types. And whereas he stands behind each, he does have an opinion on what must be thought-about the Oktoberfest. “I believe the trendy festbier ought to be the default for ‘Oktoberfest’ beer, since that’s usually what’s served in Germany.”

Head brewer at Pittsburgh’s Hop Farm Brewing Co. Matthew Gouwens agrees. “Festbier is an Oktoberfest type,” he says. To him, märzen truly makes extra sense as a spring beer due to its brewing historical past.

In maybe the strongest exhibiting of the American Oktoberfest evolution, Sierra Nevada, a reputation youthful breweries reference when explaining their resolution to brew märzen, has taken to vacillating its annual brew between märzens and festbiers. “The beer below our ‘Oktoberfest’ label is completely different every year as a result of we work with a special German collaborator every year,” says Grossman. This 12 months, they’ve made a festbier with Brauerei Gutmann. 

If the model that’s partly accountable for establishing the American craft blueprint for Oktoberfest beers now brews each types below the Oktoberfest identify, it is perhaps time to simply accept a less-tidy definition of the type. 

“I believe we are able to paint a broad-stroke definition [for] beer drinkers,” says beer decide and author Joshua Weikert. “If it’s a pale to amber lager with a bready-toasty profile and a bit of European hops character, it might plausibly be referred to as ‘Oktoberfest.’”