Talk:Märzen/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Definitions

The "incorrect" American definitions are from an authoritative source. They are accurate, valid, and properly cited. If there are similar non - American style definitions please feel free to include them as well. --Loquacious A 14:24, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Well the Deutsche Brauer Bund (The German professional Brewers´organisation) disagrees. This is how they define Maerzen:

http://www.brauer-bund.de/bierfans/sorten/spezi.htm#maerzen

Maerzen is most definitely not - in Germany at least - necessarily an amber beer. Maerzen refers to the relative strength. There are pale, amber and dark beers called Maerzen in Germany. The Oktberfest Maerzen - and as the Munich brewers call it that, who are we to tell them they are wrong - has mostly been a pale beer for a couple of decades.

Here are some examples of Maerzens from Franconia - the heartland of German lager brewing - that are not amber:

St. Georgen Bräu Gold Märzen - pale

Hebendanz Märzen-Gold -pale

Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Märzen - dark

Spezial Rauchbier Märzen - dark

Hummel-Bräu Räucherla Märzen - dark

These all come from small, traditional breweries.

Some of the Munich breweries make two types of Maerzen, pale and amber.

Paulaner Original Münchner Märzen - amber Paulaner Oktoberfestbier - pale

To say that pale Maerzen is stylistically Helles is just plain wrong and demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the history and development of lager beer styles. You can find more information on the topic (properly referenced from mostly German sources) here:

http://www.europeanbeerguide.net/lager19.htm

I could go on. Change the page back to give the American description of what they think German Maerzen should be if you want. I´ve got better things to do than keep correcting it. Patto1ro 15:53, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand why you're getting confrontational or offended. If you'd like to ADD this information, please do. What you've provided doesn't sustantiate removal of the American descriptions. Certainly the DBB description is germane, and should be included. However, it is in German, and this is the English Wikipedia. I'm positive that a translation included under the heading "Style Notes" would make this a much richer article. It's a diverse world. --Loquacious A 13:51, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Big kudos to Goethean for excellent tidying.--Loquacious A 16:24, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

I give up. Did you actually read my references?

If you think that a beer style can be reduced to this kind of tight defintion, good luck to you. My experience of beer styles "out in the wild" is very different.

This page was my test of if the Wikipedia could ever seriously tackle beer. Bye bye. Patto1ro 22:27, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

This article is now almost totally factually incorrect. Well done Afitting. Patto1ro 12:09, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I take User:Patto1ro's point to be that he does not want the Brewer's Assoc. guidelines included in the article. I disagree. The Brewer's Assoc. is a well-known set of standards for beer styles. Certainly they may be wrong, but they should be included nonetheless. If a reliable source has criticized the Brewer's Assoc. guidelines in print, we can inculde that criticism in the article as well. — goethean ॐ 15:36, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

The Brewer's Assoc. is a well-known set of standards for American beer styles. Last time I looked, Märzen was a German style. Including American definitions of a German style is ludicrous. Who made the Brewer's Assoc. an authority? What are their sources? Would you include Deutsche Brauer Bund definitions of an Imperial IPA? I think not. Patto1ro 21:53, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

The website that User:Patto1ro linked to above, europeanbeerguide.net, appears to be his own home page. The other site he linked to was in German. Since this is the English wikipedia, we will not be quoting from or linking to any foreign language sites. While I welcome data from more sources, I question User:Patto1ro's motives. Additionally, he has failed to show that the Beer Assoc. data is inaccurate. — goethean ॐ 22:07, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

How dare you question my motives. My pages are free, non-commercial and full of properly-referenced information. That was why I linked to them. What exactly is wrong with them? Are they inaccurate? Take a look at Good Beer Guide Germany by Steve Thomas page 518 - my website is quoted as one of his references. Get in touch with him and ask him if I know what I'm talking about:

http://www.german-breweries.com/Contact

The ABA pages do not include proper information on their sources. Prove that they ARE accurate.

Exactly what are my ulterior motives? I would like the Wikopedia to be accurate. Any German brewing professional reading the Märzen article would be shocked, depressed and never take the Wikipedia seriously again.

Like I said before, this argument has only convinced me to stop contributing to the Wikipedia. I think it will be the Wikipedia's loss, not mine. I'll have more time to devote to my own pages and not get distracted by stupid, destructive arguments like these. Patto1ro 23:27, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I included my translation of the DBB description in one of my previous edits. I welcome correction/clarification of my translation as I am not a native speaker of German. Patto1ro's motives aren't clear to me either, and I certainly don't appreciate the undeserved and inappropriate personal attacks. While I believe that the loss of meaningful and accurate contributions is a loss for Wikipedia; under the circumstances I don't think the loss of Patto1ro's comments will be a significant loss to this particular article. I thank him for highlighting the DBB reference, and recommend Yoga. --Loquacious A 07:25, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Is anyone else bothered by the style of this article? It's less a consistent encyclopedia article than it is a patchwork of block-quotes and citations, without the kind of basic authority that better Wikipedia articles have. I'd be interested in seeing the article itself say more about the style, in continuous, graceful prose, and if no one else is interested (and, of course, if no one else objects), I'd like to try my hand at it. -- Dunkelweizen 15:01, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it is not a good article. However, I think the history is much more important. If you would like to try, I suggest you start here: http://www.kruenitz1.uni-trier.de/cgi-bin/getKRArticles.tcl?tid=005_156+opt=1-0#5_156
You can find more here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A4rzen_%28Bier%29
but the article should include both, but with more from the encyclopedia. Mikebe 17:03, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Reading this discussion page is more than a little sad. For a long while you seem to have had the single person on earth best informed about German lager styles editing it. Then, because what he wrote didn't agree with US homebrewing texts, you threw out his edits. This, to put it mildly, kind of sucks. We're talking about someone who collects German brewing manuals from the 19th century for fun. Someone who spends his holidays in archives to read the brewing logs of long-defunct breweries. But because some homebrewer text quoting Michael Jackson says otherwise, of course this patto1ro can't be right. Well... I think you have choice to make. Either Wikipedia should be factually correct, or it should be made to correspond to the more-or-less random assertions that have become orthodoxy over the last two decades in US homebrewer circles. It seems that you have chosen the latter. This is more than a little sad, but it's probably too late to do anything about it now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by LarsMarius (talk • contribs) 22:30, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

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Number of examples?

As per a recent discussion made on another beer-style page (barleywine), I think we could all agree that there are probably far too many examples of Marzen/Oktoberfest on this wiki page. I understand how popular this style of beer is, but these are amongst the longest example lists of any article I've ever seen. I don't feel that I'm the most knowledgeable of authorities to be editing the lists, but if no one else can do so in the next few days, I will try my hand at it based on (a) overall reviews of the listed beers, and (b) historical/market significance of listed beers. I will try to cut it down to about 8 examples per country. If anyone disagrees with this move, please let me know within the next few days. Willpang (talk) 20:13, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Great idea. Dunkelweizen (talk) 18:18, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

"Beer styles related to Märzen" section?

I just noticed this section after someone attempted to edit it. Is this a helpful section? Do we want it? What does "related" mean, specifically? I'll stop with the ridiculous rhetorical questions and state outright that (1) it isn't clear to me that such a section is necessary or desirable, and (2) the usefulness of this section suffers because it isn't even clear what it means (related by brewer? city? flavor? and why not just say that?). I'd be interested in anyone's thoughts on this. Dunkelweizen (talk) 18:22, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I think you're rather right to say that overall it's sort of vague, but there's a few key points that make a Märzen what it is, and other styles can be related to it in those terms. I think specifically the work of Anton Dreher and Gabriel Sedlmayr that created the modern amber lager style (as well as a lot of the modern base for lager production in general) is the common thread here, in addition to the use of traditional German brewing practices like decoction mashing. If you look at it that way, with the Märzen as a stronger version of Dreher's original Vienna lager, the connection is pretty sensible. Haikupoet (talk) 19:07, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

That's true, but doesn't the article already say that? Dunkelweizen (talk) 19:15, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I am not even sure what "related styles" means. Does it mean, for example, that all bottom (or top)-fermented German beers are related? What is the definition of "related style"? How or what decides what is a "related style." And putting in incorrect information (i.e., Dortmunder) just makes it even more confusing. Take out the section, cut down the number of examples and the article will already be much better. Mikebe (talk) 20:14, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

OK. I'll take out the section. If anyone detects a baby being thrown out with the bathwater, I suggest working the vital lost information back in somewhere within the article proper. Dunkelweizen (talk) 20:42, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I think it looks much better already. I will redo the history section since it only has one sentence now. The quote from Allaboutbeer will be removed as it is completely inaccurate. Mikebe (talk) 14:15, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

That would be appreciated! I whined about this page a long time ago but never got around to doing anything about it. Why would anyone think Josef Sedlmayr "coined" "Märzen" when brewers had been talking about them for centuries? It will be good to straighten out the facts from the fiction. Dunkelweizen (talk) 22:08, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

I've done a new version using the German WP article and another source. I hope to borrow a book or two eventually, although I don't know how much there is to add. There was one part of a sentence in the German that didn't make sense to me because I'm not a homebrewer. The sentence part in German is "Dies erreichte man durch Erhöhung des Gehaltes an Stammwürze und Alkohol". Translating it literally would be: This would be achieved by increasing the contents of wort and alcohol. (The discussion is about how the beer was prepared to last a long time.) Anyone? I've also taken out the style section as it duplicated the description section. Mikebe (talk) 18:30, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

So far so good. "Stammwürze" refers to original gravity, so "increasing the content of original gravity and alcohol" would be my guess. I could be wrong about the "an"--I'm terrible with prepositions. Dunkelweizen (talk) 12:03, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

(the indenting is going too far, so I'll start from here.) Sure, I'll use your suggestion, but I hesitated because Stammwürze can actually mean either and since hops were the other method, I thought to use wort since it is, like hops, a sort of ingredient. I'll see if anything interesting comes out of the books, but I'm not too hopeful. Mikebe (talk) 14:20, 23 September 2008 (UTC)