Beverage of the Week: Firestone Walker's Oaktoberfest is one of the best märzens I've ever had

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

Oktoberfest is my season. Not just because the weather cools off and football is firmly upon us, but also because märzens flood the market with the most drinkable beer style in the universe. There’s nothing quite like a bready, malty Oktoberfest brew, a beer that’s as easy to drink as a light beer but loaded with enough flavor that you can drink them a liter at a time and not get sick of them.

Germany’s märzens are the standard bearer because their breweries have been making them for hundreds of years. That leaves America’s beermakers playing catchup. This doesn’t mean U.S. Oktoberfests are bad or inherently inferior — they’re usually great! It does mean brewmasters have a little room to experiment with a recipe that’s already pretty much perfect, but not infallible.

That means these beers vary a little more from coast to coast than their European counterpart. In a few places, that means a heavier hop load — the solution to lots of problems in American microbreweries and honestly not a terrible one. At California’s Firestone Walker, it means maturing the brew inside oak barrels to impart a smooth, slightly earthier beer that doesn’t throw away the hop profile, either.

Is it any good? Well, yeah. It might be the best beer I’ve had this year.