I love the Christmas holiday season, and not just because I get lots of time off work—it’s how I use that time. Throughout the fall, I’m usually brewing beers for the holiday parties (which I now get to drink, so that’s nice) or brewing the bigger/darker beers that people will want when we get snowed in. But around Christmas, I get to go back to brewing whatever I feel like brewing, and a perennial favorite is the Vienna lager. Partly, I love it because some beers just stick in your head (I can’t forget, for some reason, that this beer was invented by Anton Dreher in the 19th century), but mostly I love it because it delivers the toasty malt flavors I love with a dry and clean background. It’s also a low-ABV beer that holds up beautifully to age, so if it ends up waiting in line to get on tap, I still have a great beer ready to go.
Style
Although it bears some superficial resemblance to Oktoberfest, the Vienna lager is a distinctly different animal. Both are amber lagers of Germanic origin, but the Vienna is much more sessionable than the Oktoberfest. “But wait,” you’re thinking, “don’t they drink Oktoberfest by the liter?” They do indeed drink liters of beer at Oktoberfest celebrations, but the beer you’re most likely to get today when it’s labeled “Oktoberfest” is much richer and caramel-heavy than what they’re downing in Munich. That beer is actually much more akin to a Helles with a more floral hops nose, whereas most domestic “Oktoberfest-style” beers have more in common with bock than Vienna lager.
The Vienna is lighter (in body, color, and ABV), slightly more bitter (or at least seems so), and lands in a place where it’s toastier than the pale German lagers but nowhere near the caramel and melanoidin-heavy richness of “modern” Oktoberfest. The best examples of Vienna Lager are like drinking a liquid version of dry toast. Another way to conceptualize it is as a German lager version of special bitter, but with more carbonation and less sense of humor.