This Festbier Stays Amber While Everyone Else Went Gold and Modern

The word Festbier has drifted. At Munich's Oktoberfest, it now means a pale gold lager - what the big Bavarian houses switched to in the 1970s. That's lighter in color and body than the amber beer it replaced. Manor Hill Brewing has gone the other direction. Its Festbier, back for another year, is billed as a Vienna-style lager. That puts it in the older amber lineage rather than the modern festival one.

The grist is German Pilsen, Vienna, and Munich malts, a stack that runs from clean and pale through toasty. The brewery describes the result as rich and bready with a hint of toast, balanced by what it calls restrained and deliberate noble hop additions, ending clean and crisp. Restraint is the operative word in a beer like this. Noble hops in a malt-led lager exist to keep the sweetness in check and give the finish somewhere to land, not to be noticed on their own.

There is one Manor Hill signature that does not appear anywhere on the can. The brewery farms 14 acres of non-GMO corn at its Ellicott City property and says every beer it brews uses that corn in the recipe. It does not break out how much goes into any given batch, but by its own account the farm is in this one too.

The can, by contrast, is not subtle about the occasion at all: blue-and-white Bavarian diamonds, a mustachioed figure in a feathered hat hauling a tower of polka-dotted steins, and the brewery's "Family Owned, Farm Brewed" line running up the side.

Festbier pours for the first time Friday, August 28 at 4pm at the farm, in cans and on draught. It continues from noon on Saturday and Sunday. The Pizza Trolley is running Bavarian soft pretzels alongside it. Live music fills both weekend afternoons - Rock Creek Revival on Saturday, Dan Bregman on Sunday - and there is a comedy show in the Barn on Friday night. The fall calendar behind it is already filled in: a Munich Dunkel closing out the brewery's European Series on September 4, and Prized Pumpkin from September 18.