sam adams: octoberfest

I spotted Sam Adams in the licky store today and it was the first sighting I've had this seen - it must have come out some time in the last week or so. Fortunately I had on hand a burrito from anna's taqueria so I decided to have a tasting.

Seasonal beers are great. My gf always complains that our eating has lost its seasonal rhythm. As she explains, we import foods from across the globe to eat them when we want, even when they are wildly out of season where we live or even on our continent... with the effect that we lose touch with a vital aspect of mother earth, which is seasonality (not to mention eating stuff that grows within 100 miles of you).

But beer comes to the rescue, as it so often does. Brewing companies create seasonal beers and then market them according to strict seasonal rules -- whereby you can get octoberfest only in autumn, summer ales only in summer, etc. -- and thereby imposing an artificial naturalness on us that we have otherwise artificially deprived ourselves of from mother earth.

My favorite seasonal beer of the summer was Totally Naked by New Glarus up in WI. That beer is seasonal. Last fall my dad went to buy some and was told "they're not making it anymore." We thought it had been discontinued until the next summer came. :-) Then like the Lady of the Lake, it arose from the waters in beautiful, radiant, nakedness.

I'm not so huge as many people about Sam Adams octoberfest (in my mind it may be the best known seasonal beer in America) but this beer it tough not to like. It tastes good. I spent a year in Germany. I even went to Oktoberfest. Here's proof:

possibly the only photo in existence of me with a beard

I can't say that this beer strikes me as unusually German. It's not a helles, weiss, dunkel weiss, not even a pils. But I taste it and the word "roasted" comes into my head. Meanwhile, it is very easy to drink even for poor souls whose palettes don't prefer that kind of thing. A rare combination that warrants recognition of the coming of fall... and the end of the roasting heat of summer.