Colorado Springs Oktoberfest Showdown 2023
Jesse had a great idea, what if we had our friends from the homebrew club show up somewhere and bring a crowler of an Oktoberfest beer from a local brewery, and then we can all taste them and say which ones are our favorite? Genius! So we put out the call, and ended up with 13 homebrewers, most of whom are also beer judges, show up with beers from around town. We coordinated some so there would be any duplicates.
In the video below we talk to some of them, ask what they were looking forward to, what they liked, and even talk a bit about the difference between an Oktoberfest, a Marzen, and a Festbier. Huge thanks to Trinity Brewing for setting us up in their Forge Road brewery! Much of the video is a bit noisy, bear with it, and we’re looking at this as a proof of concept for future tastings and interviews. We’ll do better next time.
A couple of notes, after Jesse organized this tasting, we learned that Red Leg Brewing had won Silver with their Wunderbier at GABF this year. Congratulations to Red Leg on their GABF medal! Unfortunately, it wasn’t one of the ones that we had, but I’m sure it’s good! Also, we didn’t get every Oktoberfest offering in the Colorado Springs, that was a limitation of the number of participants, we weren’t trying to slight any breweries and would have loved to have them all. Also, a couple of the beers were donated to the effort by the breweries, this in no way influenced our thoughts or review.
The beers we were tasting (in no particular order) were:
- Urban Animal – Oktoberfest
- Peaks N Pines – Oktoberfest Marzen
- Black Forest – Oktoberfest (Festbier)
- Metric – Festbier
- Mash Mechanix – Oktoberfest
- FH Beerworks – Oktoberfest
- Bristol Brewing – Red Baron Octoberfest
- Phantom Canyon – OktoberFest
- Goat Patch – Maerzen Lager
- Brass Brewing – Schutzenschnur (OktoberFestbier)
- OCC Brewing – Union Made Oktoberfest
- Trinity Brewing – XToberfest
We selected the top beers based on a people’s choice selection process. Top beers are announced in the video.
