Curse of the Damned Drops the Copper and Arrives in Actual September

Back after a two-year hiatus and rebuilt along the way, trading copper color and caramel malt for bright golden German lager. Adroit Theory is also pointedly releasing its Oktoberfest beer in Oktoberfest season.

Style: Festbier Lager
Release Date: 2026-09-25
ABV: N/A
Adroit Theory Brewing Company (Purcellville, VA)

Adroit Theory would like it noted that it is releasing its Oktoberfest-style festbier in September. "Unlike everyone else, we're dropping our Oktoberfest Style Festbier actually in September, not July," the brewery wrote in announcing the beer. "Crazy concept."

The point has some teeth to it. Oktoberfest beers have crept steadily earlier in the American release calendar for years, to the extent that midsummer shelf space for autumn lagers is now unremarkable. Curse of the Damned arrives Friday, September 25, which puts it inside the actual Munich festival dates.

The beer has been away for a while. Adroit Theory last brewed it in September 2024, and says the two-year gap has been used to rebuild it rather than simply to rest it. The revision moves away from copper color and caramel maltiness, toward what the brewery describes as a bright golden German lager: clean, bready and gently toasty, with a smooth dry finish. The brewery frames the change as bringing the recipe in line with its newer offerings.

That shift tracks with how the style itself is defined. Festbier at Munich now means the pale gold lager the big Bavarian houses moved to in the 1970s. The amber, caramel-forward version most American drinkers picture is the older Marzen profile that it replaced. Adroit Theory's revamp is essentially a move from the second to the first.

What that buys is drinkability. The brewery describes a balance of rich malt flavor against light, crisp hop bitterness, with mild floral or spicy notes, and says the result is easy to drink in quantity. The packaging backs the claim up: 35 cases, comfortably the largest run in a week that also included two new IPAs at three and four cases apiece.

Curse of the Damned arrives Friday in Purcellville, on draft and in cans.

Editor’s Take

Thirty-five cases. That is the number that gives this one away. The new hazy double IPA in the same announcement got three cases and the triple IPA got four, and then here is the festbier at thirty-five, which is roughly everything else on the list combined. A brewery best known for imperial stouts named after serial killers has quietly made the clean golden lager its biggest print run of the week.

I find that genuinely cheering. The whole design brief of a festbier is that you can drink a great deal of it without the beer objecting, and Adroit Theory has packaged accordingly. The recipe revision points the same way: out with the copper color and the caramel malt, in with bready and gently toasty and dry. And releasing it in late September rather than midsummer is the correct call, even if it does mean competing with everybody else's Oktoberfest that has been sitting on shelves since the Fourth of July. Serve it cold, in something larger than you think you need.

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.