Freshtoberfest Puts Fresh Tettnang Into an Oktoberfest Lager

Oktoberfest season and fresh hop season land in the same weeks, so Gigantic took its Oktoberfest lager and dosed it with fresh Tettnang from Goschie Farms. Crisp, malty, snappy, and green.

Style: Fresh Hop Oktoberfest Lager
Release Date: 2026-09-07
ABV: 5.6%
Gigantic Brewing Company (Portland, OR)

Two seasons overlap in Oregon in September. Oktoberfest beers arrive, and the hop harvest comes down. Gigantic Brewing Company has put both into one glass.

Freshtoberfest is the brewery's Oktoberfest lager given the fresh hop treatment, brewed with fresh Tettnang from Goschie Farms and released September 7 at 5.6 percent. Gigantic describes it as crisp, malty and snappy, and is straightforward about the reasoning: Oktoberfest and fresh hop season happening at the same time struck them as worth celebrating.

The hop choice is the unusual part. Fresh hop brewing is overwhelmingly an IPA practice, and the varieties that turn up in it are typically American aroma hops selected for volume. Tettnang belongs to a different tradition entirely. It is one of the German noble hops, named for the growing region in southern Germany, and it is prized for a fine, herbal, faintly spicy aroma and a soft bitterness. In a Marzen or an Oktoberfest lager it is a seasoning, not a headline.

Fresh-hopping it inverts the usual arrangement. The technique exists to deliver a big green hit of hop character, and here it is being pointed at a hop whose whole appeal is restraint, in a malt-forward style with nowhere to hide a mistake. Lagers also give a brewer far less cover than a hazy IPA does, which makes it a more exposed place to try something.

Freshtoberfest is out now, second in a run of five fresh hop beers Gigantic is releasing across September.

Editor’s Take

Nearly every fresh hop beer ever brewed has been an IPA, for the excellent reason that the technique and the style want the same thing: as much hop character as can be crammed through the door. Tettnang wants nothing of the sort. It is a noble aroma hop, bred over a very long time to be tasteful, and its entire job description in a lager is to be noticed slightly and then get out of the way.

So this is a loud technique applied to a hop with no interest in being loud, in a style where the malt is meant to win. I find that genuinely delightful. It is the beer equivalent of hiring a stunt driver to parallel park. The odds are that what turns up in the glass is an Oktoberfest lager with something faintly green and herbal running underneath the bready part, which is not a flavour many people have had the chance to try, because almost nobody bothers to make it.

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.