Bayernbiere Bought and Drunk

Just to dot the "i", Paulaner/H-P is also 49% owned by Heineken if memory serves.

 

My edit window expired, sorry for the double-response...

I meant to add that you can also order the Dopplesticke online (here).

 

Yeah, drmeto sort of alluded to that with Paulaner/H-P being 50.1% owned by Schörgruber Ventures and 49.9% Heineken N.V. -- thus my reference to "competitors-in-conglomo."

 

Shows the perception different people have -- I didn't find a beer at the Oktoberfest I didn't like. It was like Disneyland for me.

 

In fairness, I've only had Spaten and Hacker Pschorr in the tents, everything else was the bottled iteration.

 

I know the situation has improved since my early das of ticking, but still- the aviability of Eiche and Doppelsticke is not good. I remember picking up some Eiche at Cafe Abseits when it was kind of new.......
And I just prefer buying my beer at a local shop when I feel like it. And I could not really do this with Eiche for instance, even in Bamberg.

I had Spaten Okto, in a bottle. But it was in 2006, I even found my tasting notes from back then:
"Sehr sehr süffiges Bier, geht extrem schnell runter, auch wennes geschmacklich nicht als die Offenbarung bezeichnet werden kann. Goldgelb im Glas und mit phänomenaler Schaumkrone, gibt es sich recht malzig,süßlich im Mittelteil,der Abgang gestaltet sich dann sich dann recht getreidig und leicht sprittig. Insgesamt wie eingang erwähnt sehr süffig, aber......die Aromen könnten mir etwas feiner,überraschender sein."
In short:sweet,high drinkability, but I was not impressed.

 

If Spaten Okto is sweet to you, do not try any of the major U.S. breweries' Oktoberfests!

Truthfully, there are some very good ones, but there are also some very sweet ones -- comparatively, Spaten is a Gin Martini.

Though I see you were drinking the Wies'n

, and I only ever had Spaten's at the Wies'n, but I don't recall it being overly sweet.

This is what we get over here:

(apologies for the older label, but the beer is the same)

 

Drank our Kneitinger dunkel and Kneitinger bock last night. Both were top notch.
The dunkel is rich and bready, but not as sweet as I was expecting. It also has a tiny bit more potency as well. It's a bit like the ones from Bamberg in that regard.
The bock has a similar richness that the best doppels have, but it didn't have as heavy of a body to it. As a result, it's very easy to drink. The Hofbrau Urbock might be the closest comparison I can think of, but it's a tiny bit bolder.
I'd love to have access to more.
Of the traditional German beers, we still have a Krug lagerbier and Pott's Landbier left. We have several craft offerings I plan on bringing to a blind tasting just to see what people really think of them. That's always a fun way to see if your pre-conceived notions are way off.

 

Finally had this year's Oktoberfest/fest beers delivered to my local monopoly. No Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest sadly, I thought for sure some of it would end up over here. It still feels a bit like christmas to be able to try the Munich variants again, along with a couple of new Swedish variants, the obligatory Samuel Adams and a couple of Bavarian festbiere which I haven't had before. I'll be interested in trying the two Swedish versions, one dark and one pale, coming from two Swedish craft breweries which are focused on brewing lager beers.

 

This one was meh...

 

What was the date on that -- wasn't it released in Spring?

 

I'm interested to hear your thoughts in comparison to all of the others I see -- very different experience, I'd imagine.

 

I'll be sure to report back to this thread as I try them (and saving the odd-man-out SA for later in the game). In past years I've thought it was overly sweet to the point of only buying a single bottle, so I already know what I'm expecting to think, but with these reoccuring seasonal beers I find that I sometimes change my mind about them. Alot of time has passed and alot of new beers have been drunk since I last had it.

 

First up is Spaten Oktoberfest beer. I'm not sure if it's the fact that it's the first beer on a friday night but this beer is quite drinkable. The aroma is fresh, clean and malty with some light herbal notes, and the taste is a balance of malt sweetness and some good balancing bitterness and very light hop flavors. I recall this being quite sweet from last time around but the overall impression this time is much more balanced. The more I drink of it the more distinct the malty breadiness of the beer becomes which is very nice. I expect that the specs for this beer will be pretty much identical this year compared with the last couple of years, so any change in impression is probably down to my own evolving tastes.

 

Not sure I like the looks of that ingredient list...

 

It has a drink by date of 1/2016

 

The hop extract? Or kornmalt (barley malt)?

 

Kornmalt -- I didn't know that translated to barley -- figured it was corn. Sort of an odd twist of translation.

Oh, and I feel better now.

 

Hmm. Looking at my review I liked it a lot, but I remember getting some a few months later and it had gone sort of flat in flavor.

 

On to the next beer. As per the OG and abv listed on both labels one would assume that Löwenbräu would be drier (both having 13.7% OG, with Spaten at 5.9% and Löwenbräu at 6.1% abv), but to me Löwenbräu is significantly sweeter. It's also lighter in color than Spaten. I'm wondering if a larger amount of Munich malt could explain the greater balance of flavors in Spaten. I did get some of the same bready maltiness in it as I get from one of the Swedish macros which uses a grist of 80% pilsner malt and 20% munich malt.