Radegast Birell
Pivovar Radegast

 

 

I got this beer form a collegue who was in this region and a few days ago i decided to taste this one. Once i opened it i got the feeling this was not a normal beer. Checking the bottle made me realise this was a low alcohol beer. Ah well. let's drink it anyway.

Poured in my Struise glass this beer looks ok, not spectacular. The beer is lightambercoloured with a broken white head with big bubbles. Very light carbonation.

The beers itself is not one of the best low alcoholbeers i drank untill now. Very watery and nop hop feelable. The beer is nat bad but also not super. Surprisingly the carbonation came free a bit in the mouth.

First, let me raise my bottle to bigrzman for his service in Afghanistan--and also for being a fellow Yinzer!

Second, I gave this drink a 3.0 ("average") for its appearance and smell, as I'm drinking it from a bottle and can't see how it looks through the brown glass and can't really smell too much. I figure that a 3.0 might be generous for both of these categories but I'm trying to be fair. Now, on to the (brief) review:

T: Not much going on here. Although I should say it tastes just like the Saaz hops I was chomping on at the Pilsner Urquell factory yesterday.

M: Watery.

D: At 0.5%, you could put back quite a few of these if you wanted to, but I don't...

I am basing this on memory. I was deployed to Afghanistan and there were few options of a malted beverage. There was Beck NA, O'Doul's, and Radegast because we were on a FOB with Czechs. Let me tell you this is by far the best NA ever! It tasted like beer with actual Saaz hop taste and it was not too sweet. It tasted like a Pilsner with no buzz. i used to drop a shot of acquired vodka in this and it tasted like the real deal...no BS. Let me say if I can't drink alcohol ever again i would drink this stuff because it is awesome for the style!

This being a non-alkoholic beer, of course you will miss the nice buzz from alcohol, and the beer does not have the same fullness in taste. Purists will probably dispute that it's even a beer.

Judged as a non-alcoholic beer, however, I think it is excellent. It tastes like beer, unlike many others, which taste like soaked bread, and it is very refreshing. Great summer refreshment even when you don't have to drive, but just don't want the heaviness of a normal beer.

As responsible beer drinkers, we sometimes have to come to terms with the fact that we can't just sit around and drink beer all day long...Radegast Birrel does a decent job of filling the gap created by such situations and while it's certainly not what I would call optimal, for a nonalcoholic beer, it's pretty damn good. The thing that usually gets me about nealko beers is that they don't really taste like "beer." This is not the case here however and a birrel will surely quench your thirst when nothing but a beer will do. Everything else is pretty sub par - looks, smell, mouthfeel - they all kind of scream "NO ALCOHOL" but hey, it tastes like beer and that definitely counts for something.