This was the first beer that we brewed where we also designed a recipe. One of my favorite styles of beer is an Oktoberfest Märzen. This is traditionally a lager, but we lack the equipment we need to make a proper lager. In designing this recipe, this was taken into account. Kölsch (an ale) is a style of ale that is typically very close to a pilsner (a lager). For this reason, we used Wyeast Labs #2565 as the yeast for this beer.

The next target for this beer was the flavor profile. A märzen style beer is typically malt forward. To try to bring this profile forward in the recipe, 2.25 lbs of caramunich malt was used in addition to 9.5 lbs of 2 row malt. This grain bill gave the beer a nice color as well as a nice malt forward taste. One thing that we found was lacking in this recipe was the mouthfeel of a typical märzen. The beer that we made was malt forward and not too hoppy, but was rather thin, as one might imagine a kölsch to be. At the moment we are not sure what steps to take to fix this issue, but a Storchtoberfest 2.0 is in development with a larger grain bill to see if the additional sugar will resolve the issue.

I chose the hops based on descriptions in The Hops List. I landed on 1 oz of Tettnang at 60 minutes and 1 oz of Saaz at 15 minutes. The floral characteristics of these hops allow for just the right bittering of the beer without giving the beer the hoppy characteristics of an IPA.

Overall, I would rate the Storchtoberfest V1 beer a success. It tastes great! If I were to rate it on Untappd, I would give it 3.75 (I would give it 4 but I am deducting .25 since I am biased). Additionally, the simple grain bill and hop schedule allows me to modify it and see what changes occur based on the modified grain bill.

Stay tuned for the results of Storchtoberfest V2 and please leave a comment if you know anything about how to achieve the mouthfeel of the märzen in an ale.