Saxon Black Puts Coffee and Toast in a 4.6 Percent Lager

The lightest of Blood Brothers' four Bloodtoberfest lagers, Saxon Black is a 4.6 percent schwarzbier the brewery describes in terms of dark chocolate, toasted bread and coffee, with the bitterness deliberately held back.

• Style: Schwarzbier
• Release Date: 2026-09-25
• ABV: 4.6%
• Blood Brothers Brewing (Toronto, ON)

Blood Brothers Brewing has put four German lagers out at once for this year's Bloodtoberfest, and the darkest of them is also the smallest.

Saxon Black is a schwarzbier at 4.6 percent ABV, the lowest-strength beer in the Toronto brewery's seasonal slate. The brewery describes it as smooth and crisp, balancing dark chocolate and lightly roasted malt against notes of toasted bread and coffee, with what it calls a very restrained bitterness keeping the beer clean and refreshing.

That restraint is the whole technical problem of the style. Schwarzbier gets its colour from a small proportion of heavily roasted malt, and roasted malt brings its own sharp, drying bitterness along with the colour. Add too much and the beer stops reading as a lager. The coffee and dark chocolate notes Blood Brothers are pointing at come from that same malt, so the recipe is a matter of taking the flavour and leaving the edge behind.

The toasted bread note is the tell that there is more than roast in the grist. Bread and biscuit character comes from the paler German malts underneath, and in a beer this low in alcohol they are what keeps the middle from feeling hollow.

Blood Brothers call this their latest schwarzbier, which suggests the recipe has had previous outings rather than arriving new this autumn. It is a reasonable style to keep returning to. At 4.6 percent it is built for a long evening rather than a single pour, and it would sit well next to anything off a grill without competing for attention.

Saxon Black is available now in 473 mL cans from Blood Brothers Brewing on Geary Avenue in Toronto, alongside the other three Bloodtoberfest releases.