Name: Feast
Brand: Fairweather Brewing Company
Availability: InStock

Fairweather Brewing Company has a festbier out, and its newsletter description of the recipe runs to "a medium malt profile, fresh, flinty yeast character, and hops... in it."

The beer is called Feast. It is a Festbier at 5.8 percent ABV, available in 473 ml cans through the Hamilton brewery's online shop. The can describes it as the brewery's take on German festbier, inspired by hedonism and little else.

Behind the deadpan, the brewery does commit to a flavour profile: spicy, rye bread, balance. Those three notes track closely to what the style is supposed to deliver. Festbier is the pale gold lager that the large Munich breweries moved to in the second half of the twentieth century, lighter in colour and body than the amber Marzen it displaced, and built to be drunk in volume rather than sipped. A bready malt character and a restrained, faintly spicy hop presence are the working parts, and balance is less a tasting note than the entire design brief.

The flinty yeast character Fairweather mentions points at the fermentation side of that. Clean lager yeast, fermented cold, is what keeps a beer of this strength from accumulating the fruity esters that would make it tiring over a long afternoon.

Fairweather has built its reputation more on hop-forward beers and sours than on traditional German lagers, which makes a straight festbier a change of register for the brewery rather than a house specialty.

Cans are in the online shop now.

Editor’s Take

"Inspired by hedonism, and little else" is doing a lot of work for four hundred years of Bavarian brewing history, and I mean that admiringly. Festbier is a beer engineered around a specific and slightly absurd problem: how do you make something a person can drink out of a one-litre glass, outdoors, for several consecutive hours, and still walk home. The answer involved a great deal of unglamorous lager discipline - long cold conditioning, restrained hopping, a malt bill tuned to finish clean rather than linger.

So the three words on Fairweather's tasting notes are the interesting part. Spicy, rye bread, balance. That is not a flavour list so much as a description of a job being done properly: the spice from noble-style hopping, the bready malt that gives the beer something to say, and balance as the actual deliverable. Pair it with anything roasted and salty, stand outside, and let the 5.8 percent do what the style was built to do.

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.

Feast Lists Its Inspiration as Hedonism, and Little Else

Fairweather's festbier arrives with a straight face on the can and a joke in the newsletter. The tasting notes it does commit to - spicy, rye bread, balance - describe the style about as precisely as three words can.

Source & Editorial