Brown Ales, Märzens and the Autumn Beers Worth a Game Night
Märzen, brown ale, Vienna lager, amber ale and an honest word on pumpkin beer: autumn styles worth opening, and the cold-weather food to pour them with.
By Rafael Antunes8 min read
Every autumn there is one evening when my beer fridge changes over. Nothing marks it on a calendar. The patio chairs have been stacked in the garage for a few weeks, football fills the whole of Sunday, and basketball has settled out of its opening rush into the long middle of November. I reach for a pale lager out of habit, look at the dark coming down at five o'clock, and put it back.
Autumn beer is not a style. It is a handful of styles that happen to suit the season: more malt, more colour, a little more weight, and flavours that run from toasted bread to caramel to hazelnut. They also happen to suit what people cook once the evenings turn cold, which is to say chili, sausages, braises and anything that can roast in a hot oven through the pre-game show.
What follows is what I pour from Halloween until the first snow that actually stays, plus an honest word about the one autumn category that gets more shelf space than it earns. If some of the style names are new, the guide to beer styles on game day covers the basics of each family.
Märzen, and what "Oktoberfest" on a can means
Märzen takes its name from März, the German word for March, and the name is a leftover from the days before refrigeration. Bavarian brewers were long forbidden to brew through the summer, when warm weather spoiled beer and a lit brewhouse was a fire risk. So the last batches of spring were brewed a little stronger, laid down in cool cellars and drawn on through the warm months, with the final barrels finished off in autumn. A lager built to keep.
A good Märzen is amber to copper, around 5.5 to 6 percent, with a soft, toasty malt flavour, a clean finish and just enough hop bitterness to keep it from turning sweet. The best ones taste like the crust of a soft pretzel. Not the salt, the crust.
One point of confusion is worth clearing up. The beer poured in the tents at the Munich festival these days is mostly a golden lager called Festbier, paler and drier than this. The amber Märzen is what most North American brewers mean when they print "Oktoberfest" on a label, and with food it is the one I would rather have.
By early November the festival cans have usually been marked down or pushed to the bottom shelf. Don't turn your nose up. With no delicate hop aroma to lose, a Märzen holds up better than most seasonal releases, provided it has been kept cold. Check the date on the can, buy from a store that keeps it in a cooler, and take a few home.
Vienna lager, the quieter cousin
If Märzen is a slice of toasted rye, Vienna lager is a dinner roll. Same family of toasty, amber malt, but lighter in body, drier, and usually a touch lower in strength, around 4.5 to 5.5 percent. It is the beer I pour for people who are not ready to give up their summer lager. It looks like autumn in the glass and drinks almost like a pilsner, which makes it the right opener for a game that starts at one in the afternoon and might not be over until dinner.
Brown ale, the most overlooked tap on the board
In ten years of pouring, the style I reached for most often in autumn was the one customers ordered least. Brown ale sits on a tap list between the IPAs and the stouts with nothing flashy to say for itself, and most people skip right past it.
They are missing out. English-style brown ales taste of toffee, hazelnut and biscuit, with soft bitterness and around 4 to 5.5 percent alcohol. Some lean drier and nuttier, others darker and sweeter. American brown ales start from the same base and add a good deal more hops, so you get pine and citrus over the cocoa, usually around 5 to 6.5 percent.
What makes brown ale a game-night beer is that it has flavour without fatigue. You can drink a second one without feeling you have eaten a loaf of bread, and it gets along with nearly everything on an autumn table. Serve it a little warmer than lager, around 45 to 50°F (7 to 10°C). Straight from the back of a cold fridge, the nutty notes go quiet.
Amber ale
American amber ale was the house beer at a lot of early brewpubs, before IPA took over the first six handles on every board. It is caramel-forward, with enough hops to keep it honest, and runs around 4.5 to 6 percent. Amber is the most adaptable beer on this list. It works with roast chicken, with a cheddar burger, with sausages and with a plate of nachos when the late game runs long. If you are buying one mixed case to cover a few Sundays, amber is the safe middle of it.
Pumpkin and spiced beers: an honest take
Pumpkin beer has a real history. Colonial brewers in New England used pumpkin and squash as a source of sugar when malted barley was scarce or expensive, and the result was a rustic, earthy ale that nobody now would recognize.
The modern version is something else. Most pumpkin beers are amber or brown ales spiced the way you would spice a pie: cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, allspice, sometimes ginger, often with a sweet finish. The pumpkin itself adds very little. Roasted squash can bring a faint earthiness and some body, but what you taste is the spice.
Two problems keep me from loving the category. The first is the calendar. Many of these beers land on shelves in August, when it is still hot enough to fry an egg on the deck, and by early November a lot of what is left has been sitting for weeks with its spice going dusty. The second is that spice builds up. One glass is pleasant. By the second, it can taste like the inside of a candle shop.
Good ones do exist, and they share a few things. The base beer is one you would drink without the spice. The spice sits in the background. The finish is dry enough that you want another sip rather than a glass of water. My advice is to treat pumpkin beer as dessert. A small pour next to a slice of pie or an apple crisp is where it finally makes sense, since the beer is then at least as sweet as the plate.
Spiced winter ales start appearing around the middle of November, darker and stronger again. They belong to December.
Fresh-hop beer, the one you might have missed
Most hops are dried in a kiln within hours of picking, which lets brewers store them and use them all year. Fresh-hop beers, sometimes called wet-hop, skip that step. The cones go from the bine (hops climb on bines, not vines, as every homebrew judge will remind you) into the brewhouse within a day or so of harvest.
Harvest in the main growing regions runs from late August through September, and there are hop farms now in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec as well as the big American growing areas. So fresh-hop beers show up in September and early October, and they are best within a few weeks of brewing. They taste green and sappy, more like crushed hop cones in your hand than the concentrated tropical fruit of a modern IPA. Some people love that. Some find it grassy.
By November, if you spot one at the back of the shelf, leave it there. It is the one autumn beer that does not keep. Mark the first cool week of September for the next round.
Autumn game food and what to pour with it
These are the dishes that turn up on my counter between Halloween and the first real snowfall, with the beer I would put next to each. The general principles (cut, complement, match the weight) are laid out in the beer and bar food pairing guide. This is the seasonal shortlist.
| Dish | Pour | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Beef and bean chili | Märzen or Vienna lager | Toasty malt meets browned beef, and low bitterness leaves the chili heat alone |
| Bratwurst with sauerkraut and grainy mustard | Märzen | An old German pairing that still has no real rival |
| Pulled pork sliders | Brown ale | Caramel in the glass, caramel on the bark |
| Maple-glazed wings | English brown ale | Toffee meets maple, with enough dryness to stop it cloying |
| Roast chicken and root vegetables | Amber ale | Caramel malt echoes the browned skin and roasted carrots |
| Pierogies with fried onions and sour cream | Vienna lager | Light enough for the butter, toasty enough for the onions |
| Butternut squash soup | Brown ale | Nutty against sweet and earthy |
| Braised short ribs | American brown ale | Hops cut the fat, cocoa meets the braise |
| Aged cheddar and sliced apple | Amber ale | Bitterness cuts the cheese, malt meets the fruit |
| Apple crisp or pumpkin pie | Pumpkin beer, small pour | Spice with spice, sweet with sweet |
A few notes from the stove. If your chili is very hot, keep the spiced beers away from it, since cinnamon on top of chili heat turns muddy fast. A bottle of brown ale poured into the chili pot along with the stock adds a roasted depth that water never will. And bratwurst simmered for 15 minutes in Märzen with a sliced onion, then finished over hot coals until the casing blisters and the centre reads 160°F (71°C), is the best thing you can do with a pack of sausages on a cold Sunday. The charcoal grilling guide for beginners covers setting up a two-zone fire for exactly that kind of finish.
Pacing a long autumn Sunday
Malty beers go down easily, and a Märzen is not a light beer. A full imperial pint of a 6 percent Märzen works out to about two Canadian standard drinks. The one-litre mugs people bring home from festival trips hold about three and a half.
On a day with games stacked from early afternoon to late evening, I build the order the way I would build a meal. Vienna lager for the first game, while everyone is still snacking. Märzen or amber with the real food. Brown ale for the late game, in a smaller glass. Water between every one, and the pumpkin beer, if there is one, as dessert.
My November fridge looks about the same most years: a six-pack of Vienna lager, a few Märzens bought cheap the week after Halloween, two or three brown ales for whatever runs late, and a single pumpkin beer, which I will open next to a slice of pie and enjoy, once.
