Tag: passau

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beer reviews breweries Germany

The breweries of Passau: Löwenbrau

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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breweries Germany

The breweries of Passau: Hacklberg

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.