Archive for the ‘Germany’ Category

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Schlenkerla Helles

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Last year, we met up with Ron Pattinson in Cask and spent a few hours discussing Franconia, East Germany and His Big Book. Ron spotted Schlenkerla Helles in the fridge and recommended it.

We’d not tried it before and loved it. There is no smoked malt in the beer but, being brewed in the same building and with the same equipment as their darker smoked beers, it can’t help but pick up a bit of smokiness.

We never got round to writing this up and, in the months since then, we haven’t seen it on sale in Cask. Our favourite London pub has recently, however, even further expanded it’s beer selection and the Helles has popped up again so were able to enjoy a couple of bottles this week.

In fact, if you’re a fan of Rauchbier, Cask now has several different varieties on offer, in addition to the usual suspects from Schlenkerla.

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Posted in Beer styles, Franconia, Germany | 11 Comments »

If we send one person to Unterzaunsbach…

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

We note there’s been a fair bit of introspection recently in the blogoshire.

A comment on one of our recent posts reminds us of one reason why we do it.

Mike004 doesn’t say in his comment whether he went to Unterzaunsbach because we recommended it, but we do like the fact that, if you Google it, we’re on the first page of results.

Equally, our recent series of posts on Passau may not have set the world on fire in terms of comments, but, before we went on holiday, we struggled find much online to guide us. Hopefully, we’ve done something to help fill that gap and map (sort of) unknown territory for future beer explorers.

Mike004 also pointed out that Peschl stopped brewing in 2008. What on Earth were we drinking if not Peschl? We are confused and would be grateful for any intelligence.

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Posted in Blogging and writing, Germany | 4 Comments »

Still more to enjoy in Cologne

Monday, July 5th, 2010

We can’t believe that, with all our trips to Cologne, including a couple of dedicated Koelsch crawls, we’ve not made it to the Paeffgen brewery tap before. Perhaps it’s because it’s a bit out of the way; or perhaps it’s because we hadn’t done our research — Ron Pattinson calls it a “European must visit”.

Anyway, we made it right on our most recent trip, and were glad we did. For one thing, the beer is superb — honeyed and spicy — very much like an English ale, but also distinctly not. We’ve had it before and liked it but, here, it was stunning.

We loved observing the way the place is run, too.  All the Kobes (waiters) compete for the same barrel, half-filling glasses in a kranz, then letting it sit in a funny kind of urinal until they’re ready to go, when they top them off. The supervisor barks at them from his perch as they pass, making them stop so he can count the number of glasses they’re taking, presumably as some kind of fraud control, but alsoperhaps so they know when the barrel needs changing. And when that happens, with lots of chains and an electric winch, it’s quite a thing to behold.

Interestingly, this was one of the few times we’ve been in a Cologne beer hall at a quiet time and it  seems to mean you wait a lot longer for your beers — if there isn’t an absolute kranzload of punters, you have to wait until there is.

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Posted in Germany | 2 Comments »

Mozart comes but once a year

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

We’ve mentioned Alte Mainmuehle before. We love it so much that, when we’re on our hols, we now always try to stop off for lunch in Wuerzburg if it’s on the way. It has  great food, beautiful views and fabulous beer — the full range from local brewery Distelhäuser.

Breaking the journey back from Passau, we remarked to ourselves as we pulled into the station that only one thing could make it better — a new beer. We laughed. German breweries don’t introduce new beers, except to make them ‘Gold’ or add cola. But, what do you know, the beer gods seemed to have delivered, with Mozartbier being proudly advertised across town.

We didn’t realise how lucky we were, though, until we got home and researched it a little: it’s not a new beer, but is only available on or around the 5 June each year. How jammy are we?

It’s a cracker, too. Golden rather than yellow, conditioned rather than fizzy, it has an incredible depth of malt flavour — rye bread with added cereal — without being at all cloying. We wondered, with its name and slightly darker colour, if it was a nod to a Vienna-style lager, but it also struck as what we’d been looking for in a festbier all these years.

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Posted in Germany, beer reviews | No Comments »

Passau: we have a winner (for now)

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

We put off visiting Innstadt‘s biergarten because, from the outside, it looked a bit fake, like something from Disneyland. Nor were we expecting much from the beer. A big company, slick but boring branding… surely it would be another Hacklberg or Lowenbrau?

What a surprise. For starters, the helles was subtle rather than bland, as hoppy as the beers some other breweries in town were labelling as pilsners. Lovely.

The range was more varied, too. As well as the holy trinity (pils, helles, weizen) there was a zwickl with a very pleasing hint of sherbet and its own elaborate porcelain krug and several interesting looking bottles.

From the bottled range, we tried Edelsud, which (as they announced on the menu, and reiterated proudly when we ordered it) came in a swingtop bottle (“bugelflasche!!!”). It is described as an Export but, at 5.3%, and with a satisfying, heavy, toffee-ish body, it could have passed for a 6% festbier. It was really excellent — liquid bread. The hop aroma made us think briefly of Brooklyn Lager, too, which was a nice surprise in a German beer.

We didn’t get round to trying the last brewery in town, Andorfer, because we decided to spend our last day across the border in Austria. We’ve since heard that the locals consider it the best of the bunch. Bloody typical. Then again, Austria was not a wasted trip…

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Posted in Germany, beer reviews | 1 Comment »

Now we’re getting somewhere: Peschl

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Thank you, Peschl or Passau. We hadn’t dared let ourselves hope that all that folksy branding and ‘family brewery’ rhetoric might actually mean interesting beer but were over the moon to be proved wrong.

The benefit to all the local breweries offering similar ranges is the ease with which they can be compared. Straight off, we could tell that Peschl’s helles and pils had more zing than the respective offerings from Hacklberg and Lowenbrau. They weren’t transcendent, but we certainly found them interesting and agreed that, if we could never drink anything but these again, we’d probably be happy.

Even the hefe-weizens were interesting, being perhaps a little more grainy-tasting (more wheat in the mix?) and a touch sour.

So, we thought we’d found the best beer in Passau, and began to feel a little more cheerful.

Nächste halt: Innstadt.

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Posted in Germany, beer reviews, breweries | 4 Comments »

The breweries of Passau: Löwenbrau

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

It seems every German city has a Löwenbrauerei or two. Your Germans are nuts about lions, especially medieval stone ones that look like dogs with perms.

Passau’s Löwenbrau is another big local brand. We saw their trucks, adverts and parasols all over town and the surrounding countryside — and, as we’ve come to expect from big regional Bavarian breweries, they’re not exactly risk-takers.

In fact, we could more-or-less repeat our review of Hacklberg. A cold helles on a terrace on the river Inn at sunset, after a hike in the sun, is always going to taste good but, really, we were beginning to think that we might have to give up on the beer in Passau…

Nächste halt: Brauerei Peschl.

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Posted in Germany, beer reviews, breweries | No Comments »

The breweries of Passau: Hacklberg

Monday, June 14th, 2010

There are five breweries in Passau.

Based on the number of times we saw their logo (including on a hot air balloon over the old town) Hacklberg seem to be the biggest. Their beers were also the first we tried, on a lovely terrace overlooking the Danube (at Am Paulusbogen).

Short review: these are average, Munich-style Bavarian beers — pale, clean and somewhat fizzy.

The helles went down very well after several hours on a hot train, but we’d struggle to describe it in a meaningful, beer-writery way. It tasted a bit of malt, a bit of hops, and mostly like, well, any other decent lager. The pils was similar but a little paler and with perhaps a hint of sulphur. The hefe-weizen was absolutely by the book and would have been hard to distinguish from Erdinger or Weihenstephan in a taste test, we suspect.

The darker beers were more interesting. The dunkles-weizen had more character than the light version — about as much as colour and flavour as Schneider Weisse, in fact. The non-wheaty dunkel had some roastiness and we disagreed over whether it was actually any good or not: Boak thought it tasted sugary, plasticky and rough-edged (in a bad way), whereas Bailey found it just on the right side of characterful, and found a few spicy flavours (caraway?).

Nächste halt: Löwenbrau Passau.

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Posted in Germany, breweries | 5 Comments »

Frankfurt, Passau and Cologne (again)

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

We’ve been on our travels! We’d normally announce an upcoming holiday here and ask for tips but, on this occasion, we spent a hectic, disorganised week before we went away in our new favourite German city of the mind: Bad Planning.

So, just to whet your appetite for what we’re afraid to say is going to be a long series of posts recounting every detail of our jaunt, here’s what we made of Frankfurt, where we stopped over for a few hours on the way out.

Zu den 12 Apostel, at Rosenburger Strasse, just north of the centre, like most German brewpubs, offers a cloudy helles and a dunkles. The helles had slightly more perceptible hops than others we’ve had, and was refreshing enough, but we’d be lying if we said it was anything special. We were pleased to find the dunkles didn’t taste sugary and unfermented as so many do, but it certainly would have benefited from more hops. Or any hops.

Any glamour these beers had was entirely because they were the first of the holiday, and those always taste good.

The food was perhaps the most interesting thing: lots of the menu was southern slavonic. We were also impressed that they’d created a pretty convincing beer garden in what was, in effect, an alleyway round the back of an office block.

Tandleman’s also been in Frankfurt recently, we note.

Nächste halt: Passau.

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Posted in Germany | 5 Comments »

Snacks to beer part 2 — schmaltz/smalec

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

I have very happy memories of visiting Poland. Chief among them is the great joy I experienced in Wroc?aw when presented with a free — yes, free! — plate of bread and dripping with my first pint at Piwnica Swidnicka.

Since then, I’ve also enjoyed it at as ‘schmaltz‘ in various places in Germany, most notably Klosterbräu in Bamberg which has several varieties, including goose fat.

They say you shouldn’t eat greasy food with beer and, yes, if you’re carrying out any kind of formal tasting, it’s probably a bad idea. But, in the real world, nothing makes a wheat beer zing like a piece of rye bread spread thickly with spicy, salty, onion-laced lard.

These days, it’s thankfully very easy to get schmaltz/smalec in the UK in any shop which stocks Polish foods.

The one I bought to eat with my beery bread had a higher meat content than some (try saying “mechanically recovered chicken and pork” without saying “mmmmmmm”…) and was very satisfying indeed. Sometimes, you’ll find it in tins; in blocks like butter or lard; or in glass jars. It’s cheap however it comes.

Let’s be clear, though: it is not health food.

That salad I had with it cancels out the fat, though, right? Right? And it’s normal to have shooting pains in your left arm, isn’t it?

If you like your grease cut with other fats, why not give Obazda a go?

Bailey

Posted in Germany, Poland, Snacks to beer, beer and food | 3 Comments »

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