Most breweries stocking up for Oktoberfest reach for a Marzen or a Festbier and stop there. Cactus Land Brewing Co. kept going down the German lager list and came back with a Dortmunder.
Dorty Dancing, a pale lager at 6% ABV, is the least familiar name on the Adkins, Texas brewery's fall board, and Cactus Land has supplied the history to explain it. Dortmunder was originally brewed by Dortmunder Union in Dortmund, Germany, in 1873, according to the brewery's notes. Those notes describe it as a soft-textured beer influenced by the pilsner being brewed in Plzen.
That lineage is essentially the whole style. Dortmund was an industrial city with hard, mineral-rich water and a workforce that drank accordingly, and its brewers answered the pilsner boom next door with something firmer and a little fuller. The result sits between the two references it borrows from: drier and more structured than a Munich helles, rounder and softer than a Czech pilsner. It is also a style that turns up rarely on North American taplists. That is reason enough to notice one on a Texas draft board.
The name is doing exactly what it appears to be doing.
Dorty Dancing is part of the lager lineup Cactus Land has assembled for the season. The brewery opens to the public only on the first and third weekends of each month at its County Road 325 taproom southeast of San Antonio.
Source & Editorial
JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.