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.
5 replies on “The breweries of Passau: Hacklberg”
You mean you find Erdinger and Weihenstephan taste the same? Surely not. The taste in Erdinger can best be described as absent and I’ve drunk it at the brewery tap. Twice, some years apart, proving that hope does triumph over expectation.
So many German wheat beers are interchangeable and/or bland, once you get over the novelty of the banana-smelling yeast. We’ve got a post half-written on the exceptions to the rule, though, which should be up in the next week or two.
Weihenstephan’s probably got a bit more character, hasn’t it? But not much.
Weihenstephan has apparently just won a gold medal for their Weißbier at the International Beer Challenge. I can only assume that not many Bavarian brewers entered.
I can’t say I’m overly excited about Weihenstephan weissbier either. I also got the impresion that the locals in Freising, while being proud of Weihenstephan from an historical perspective, seem to lean more towards Huber Weiss as their weissbier of choice, and quite nice it is too (till you get over the novelty :D).
Huber Weisse is decent. We sell it at GBBF.