When he opened Utepils Brewing seven years ago, Dan Justesen was accused of being as twisted as a Bavarian pretzel for making a hefeweizen one of his flagship beers.
“People would laugh and say, ‘You can’t sell that year-round!’” the Utepils founder recalled.
After naming the wheaty German-style beer Ewald the Golden — another unusual twist — Utepils not only had its hefe available from Day One, Justesen said, “It has been our top-selling beer every year since then.”
With Oktoberfest season now underway, breweries across Minnesota are upping their German game and offering lots of different styles of beer popular throughout Deutschland, including hefeweizens, festbiers, altbiers, dark lagers and bocks. But what about after Oktoberfest season?
Most American breweries always keep a pilsner and a light-bodied lager on tap, but other German-style beers have largely been treated as seasonal or specialty brews amid the craft-beer boom of the past two decades.
Fortunately in Minnesota, there’s a decent smattering of breweries tapped into these beers year-round — including some with histories that date back to the state’s original late-1800s wave of German immigrants. There are newer ones like Utepils, too, which is named after the Norwegian term for “summer beer.”
Justesen said he was confident Germanic beers and other old-Europe styles would catch on with local beer consumers because of who he already saw drinking those beers: other Minnesota brewers. He noticed it when they would all hang out together after industry events such as the Autumn Brew Review.
“After a day of serving all those super-flavorful IPAs and stouts, the brewers would wind up at the Glockenspiel in St. Paul or the Gasthaus in northeast Minneapolis drinking these [German] beers,” Justesen remembered. “I figured the public’s tastes would drift that way, if that’s where the brewers themselves were.”
