Bierstiefel Keeps the German Hops, Swaps In California Malt

The newsletter announcing this beer is signed by the person who brewed it. Headlands Brewing brewmaster Ryan J. Frank spends most of it accounting for a trip he took in 2013, to the Wiesn, the Munich fairground where Oktoberfest is held. What stayed with him, he writes, was not the festivities. It was the beer.

Bierstiefel Festbier is what came of that, arriving at 5.8 percent ABV for the brewery's own Oktoberfest run.

Frank describes modern Festbier as deceptively hard to brew: bright gold, deeply malty, and still drinkable by the liter across sixteen straight days. A restrained hop profile leaves the grain with nowhere to sit but the front of the beer. His summary of the problem is blunt. If the malt isn't right, the beer isn't right.

That puts the grain bill at the center of the thing, and the grain bill is the part Headlands moved. Bierstiefel is built from 100 percent Admiral Maltings, which grows its barley in California and floor-malts it in the Bay on Alameda Island. Three malts carry it: Pilsner, Hearth and Kilnsmith. The brewery describes fresh bread and cracker malt over a hint of honey, finishing dry. The Admiral mark is printed on the can next to the Headlands logo.

The hops did not move. Headlands lists a subtle dose of Tradition, a German aroma variety grown in the Hallertau. Tradition came out of a modern German breeding program but sits in the noble mold, and in a beer like this the job is to keep a malt-forward lager from reading sweet rather than to be tasted on its own terms.

So the substitution runs in one direction only. The brewery's own line is "Bavarian inspiration, California barley," and the split is exactly that literal: the hops stay in the Hallertau, the malt comes from an island in San Francisco Bay. For a style where the malt is most of the argument, sourcing all of it locally is the substantive decision rather than a flourish.

The beer anchors a two-week Oktoberfest across every Headlands beer garden, running September 19 through October 4 with decor, Oktoberfest music, a special beer lineup, and a one-liter pour of select beers paired with a biergarten pretzel for $20. Three Saturdays go further, each adding a tapping of four German imports plus two German-inspired East Bay guest taps from Wondrous Brewing and Danville Brewing, poured as curated flights: September 19 at Walnut Creek, September 26 at Berkeley, and October 3 at Lafayette and On Campus.

The name is the last piece of it. A Bierstiefel is a beer boot, and the can carries one, standing above a band of blue and white Bavarian diamonds. The beer is meant for the other vessel. Headlands calls it at home in a Masskrug, the one-liter mug, which is what the beer gardens will be filling.