Name: LagerTown
Brand: Half Acre Beer Co
Availability: InStock

On September 12, Half Acre Beer Company will spend seven hours handing out flower crowns and turkey legs. LagerTown, the Chicago brewery's Oktoberfest lager, has become the name of a full-day event as well. The LagerTown Oktoberfest Renfaire runs 1pm to 8pm and includes stein holding and sausage toss competitions, a costume contest, firkin tappings through the afternoon, guided dancing and a makers market selling jewelry, leather goods, tarot and spell jars. Turkey legs, bratwurst, pretzels and cheese curds cover the food. It is free to attend, all ages, with dogs welcome.

The beer came first. LagerTown is a seasonal lager at 5.8 percent ABV that Half Acre calls a perennial favorite, and the brewery's description is mostly about color: a brilliant copper glowing under a cap of khaki foam.

That copper is a real style marker rather than a flourish. The beer poured at Munich's Oktoberfest today is pale gold, a change the big Bavarian houses made decades ago. American brewers largely stayed with the older amber version, and LagerTown sits firmly in that camp. Half Acre frames the whole thing around the tradition of people gathering to raise steins of malty lager and, in its phrase, shed some world weight.

The can art is speaking the same language as the event. Knights carry banners across a green field, a wild boar stands in the brush, and a bird sits inside a heraldic crest above the beer's name. None of it would look out of place on a Renfaire poster.

Presale packages for the event include a 20 ounce LagerTown stein and a first fill, with additional food, beer or brewery tour extras depending on the package. The beer itself is available in 12 ounce six-packs and 12-packs through October, everywhere Half Acre is sold.

Editor’s Take

Oktoberfest is a nineteenth-century Bavarian wedding party that never quite stopped. A Renaissance faire is a twentieth-century American invention involving turkey legs and a broadly negotiable relationship with the historical record. Half Acre has looked at these two things, noted that both involve costumes, communal singing and vessels of beer far larger than any doctor would endorse, and concluded that the differences are largely administrative. On September 12 they will be running both at once, in Chicago, with a sausage toss.

The detail that got me is the makers market. Flower crowns, tarot, jewelry, leather goods and spell jars. Spell jars, at an Oktoberfest. And yet look at the can: knights with banners, a wild boar in the brush, a bird set into a heraldic crest. The artwork is entirely medieval, and the party matches it detail for detail, which is a more coherent piece of world-building than most breweries manage in a decade.

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.

LagerTown Turns Into a Ren Faire, Spell Jars and All

Half Acre's Oktoberfest lager has outgrown the glass. LagerTown is now also a September 12 Ren faire at the Chicago brewery, complete with stein holding, a sausage toss and a costume contest. The beer runs through October.

Source & Editorial