This weekend we opened the first bottles of our oktoberfest and we're happy to say that our first lager is a success! This time for the tasting we did a blind taste test comparing our beer to Ayinger Oktoberfest-Marzen. It was amazing how similar they were. They were virtually the same color. The head in particular was almost identical - starting out pretty tall with very dense bubbles and eventually dissipating to just a little bit of lacing on top. Even the mouthfeel was pretty similar.
They did have noticeably (though not drastically) different flavors. The Ayinger has a little bit of an almost fruitiness to it, which I had previously thought was just a characteristic of its maltiness. The Ayinger was also a touch more bitter than our home brew.
Two of the three of us doing the tasting did prefer the Ayinger and also correctly identified which one was the home brew. Still, the fact that it wasn't blindingly (excuse the pun) obvious from the first sip, and that one of us even preferred the home brew over the Ayinger, I consider a huge success.
I could still detect a hint of acetaldehyde which may just mean the beer needs another month or two of conditioning time. I'm not sure if there's anything we're doing wrong in our process that keeps giving us this flavor, or if we just need to be brewing with enough lead time that the beer can condition for longer in the bottle before we start drinking it.
And as for the name, it's German for "The Beer, The" and is a reference to Sideshow Bob in the Simpsons episode "Cape Feare." But you already knew that. ;-)
[ Oktoberfest Bottling ] <---
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