Bayernbiere Bought and Drunk

I have good and bad news today. The good news is that I drank 5 of the 6 Hummel Bräu's Märzen I had ordered online, and they were really, really good. The bad news is I didn't review those 5; rather, I drank them with the girlfriend and enjoyed them during the Christmas season. Actually, that's still part of the good news. The bad news is that the 6th of the 6 bottles I had planned to review is infected and thus unreviewable. It's got a nice tang of sourness, and this is what you'd expect if you let a Märzen go all Brett in a 2ndary fermentation on you fermenting in primary with the regular yeast. It's refreshing is a 7-up kinda way and it tastes the way a few of my infected home-brews turned out, so I know what I'm tasting. The infected version is quite good... refreshing is the best term... but not at all what the it originally tasted like. The underlying Märzen is hidden by this tanginess, so I best not review what it originally tasted like.

Here are pics to verify I really did open and drink this beer:


I'll reorder this beer some time in the future so I'll be able to give a real report on it.

 

I hope this next beer won't be infected. I've already 5 of the 6 bottles again, so it's this one or no review.
Today we got Eichhofener's Eichator Doppelbock.

The best buy date on the label below is April, 2014, and I ordered it on Nov. 23, so it was right from the brewery to my table. It's also a 0.33L bottle, which for a 7.0% beer isn't too bad.

Here's the beer in the glass.


Appearance: Dark amber, browns, reds, not black but verging on it, very dark but still see through and clear when held up to the light. The beer is under a vanilla-white head that dissipated quickly. The pic makes the head look tan and darker, but in reality, it's not.

Aroma: The first whiffs give you sweet, roasted malts exploding into the nose. I get lots of München malt, Aroma, maybe Wiener malt, incredible amounts of caramel with a hint of burnt brown sugar and lots of umami. Wow... love the aroma... no alcohol and a almost no hops, either, just a blast of malts. Just the aroma is WOW.

Flavor: The front has a lot of burnt roasted malt with a hint of bitterness of the hops. I also get a little tang of tartness here. The tartness spreads into the center of the tongue, and here is also where we feel the slight burn of alcohol to remind us of its bockness, giving a slight whisky cask flavor to it with complex flavors of tart cherries, raspberries and underlying tones of vanilla and the burnt sugar of a creme brûlée. The back is all caramel malts, whatever the combo they used of München and Melanoidens, Amber and Red malts, as also evidenced by the beer's red/amber color. Here's also where the alcohol kick is a little noticeable, not burning at all, but just there like a 40+ old whiskey. It really tastes like it's been lagered in a whiskey cask, though I don't think it was. The back also has that wonderful tart/sour cherry flavor that reminds me of a homemade cherry-rum concoction a student of mine gave me as a Christmas present. Maybe it's a hint of smoked malt? I don't think so, but it's incredibly complex. It's also got a hint of plums, a very little red wine going for it, too. The aftertaste is all malts, roasted and caramel, and cherries, the same flavors as all through the beer.

Mouthfeel: Very thick, warming, wonderful, feels "wet" (the opposite of dry?) and süffig, going down wonderfully like a 40+ year old whiskey.

Overall: WOW... the complexity of this beer is outstanding. It's vinous, like an old bottle of port stowed away in a cellar for 30 years, it's got caramel of a Märzen, it's got roasted malts, it's got umami of burntness, though I don't get the chocolate and other flavors mentioned by other reviewers on BA and RB. I have to say when i drank it dinner a few weeks ago, I wasn't impressed. The sweetness probably interfered, yet as a post-dinner, it's wonderful. It's such a complex beer, no straight-forward flavors except the malts, but all kinds that hit you on all sides of your mouth. I also like that it's not a cloying sweetness I've had from some Bayrische beers so strong I couldn't finish the glass, let alone the bottle. The tartness upfront and in the center is refreshing and gives a nice balance to all the roasted and caramel malt sweetness. Again.... a WOWwow beer. Give it a 4.85.

 

First of all, it's funny that you wrote double the amount about a glass than the beer.

Second, the line marking the 250ml is where the Wirt, or bartender would stop his pour, and it's also the optimal amount for swirling and thus getting the "nose" of the beer. I got 2 of these Tekuglässer, as they are officially called, or ProBier Glass (the joke here is that probieren means "to try/taste), as I've heard it in BKL. This style of glass is meant to enhance the nose and flavor, yes, but it has a psychological affect as well. Here is an article that explains the origins of this glass, which I quote from New York First:

Third, this leads me to an explanation of how this "fancy pants" glass is perceived in Germany. To use a "fancy pants" glass in a shape similar to a wine glass puts it on par with wine as a perceived "luxury" item, á la Louis Vitton or other expensive items for the chicki micki crowd, which basically moves the image of beer from an item for the common man, workers, farmers, and hence the image of the lowest cost possible as the main ISP to a drink more for the noble classes. Germany is quite class conscious, though not nearly as much as England, and you still have people who are impressed by the von in a name, which implies the nobility, and flaunt that too; even though done away with officially and governmentally, it still has a hold on the popular mindset. Though meritocratic by history, Germany still not quite as democratic in a social sense as the U.S. is, by which I mean, class in Germany can still be a huge factor in how people view the world. Marketers of course use that to their advantage. In other words, by clothing beer in a more regal, fancy, luxury oriented glass, it's able to rebrand itself, lift above the cheapest supermarket price point image and fetch far higher prices per bottle than beer would normally be in Germany. It's also why you don't see the "traditional" Pils, Weizen, Pokal or other glassware are these beer things, even though traditionally those beer styles are served therein. No, in places like BrauKunstLive, the Teku glass are de rigueur because of how it repositions beer in the mindset of the consumer. Does that make sense?

 

Finally getting around to reviewing Eichhofener's Festbier, of which I've already had 5 of the 6, so this being the last of that batch, I need to get down to it and review it. With the Festbier, I'll have reviewed Eichhofener's entire lineup of their regular beers, so that will do it for me and this brewery.
Here's what I wrote in April, 2013... so it'll be interesting to see if my perception of it is the same as before:

Appearance: Unlike the image above, it's deep amber with more orange than red, clear as a bell, under a snow white head that dissipated quickly. Looks very Märzen-like. The color indicates München and Melanoiden malts abound.

Aroma: Lots and lots of Münchner malt aromas, caramels and breadiness in a typical Märzen smell that draws you inside the TEKU beer glass and gets the tongue ready to savor the flavor.

Flavor: In the front I get a hint of tartness, and almost only a hint of bitterness, but it's lurking there and noticeable if you look for it. The middle is more pronounced tartness, almost a slight lemony flavor, but not quite, maybe from The sides pick up the caramel and bread flavor for the first time, exactly like the aroma. In the back, again, a noticeable tartness but also a nice amount of caramel from Münchner malts, not overwhelming or a majority of the taste, but it's got that Märzen-like flavor in the back. Basically, it's a sweet-sour-like combo of tartness and caramel flavors mixing quite nicely and equally to give this an interesting interpretation of the Festbier style. The aftertaste is all caramel and breadiness, lingering long after the swallow is done.

Mouthfeel: Typisch-Bayrisch, or typical Bavarian: thick but here not too much and a tad on the dry side from the large amount of tartness present on all parts of the tongue.

Overall, an immensely pleasurable aroma of a Märzen and the flavors of sweet caramel and tartness balanced equally, then finished off with full on caramel overdrive in the aftertaste. Very good beer. Not the best ever, but easily a cut about the average Festbiers. This beer held its own and complimented a wide variety of foods I ate, from cake to steak, fries to tortilla chips, though I found the sweet flavors of food worked the best as a compliment. What from the aroma and aftertaste is a typical Märzen, a sweetness that lulls you drowsiness like a siren singing her song, the tartness then gives a slight kick that picks you up instead. So it really is a nice beer to drink in summer and in winter.

 

While everyone's arguing in the other threads, I'm doing some serious reviewing here . Got my last Eichhofener, of which I had 4 1L bottles to drink from my December order from Bavarian Biershop (not Biershop Bayern). This is the last one, so I better review it before my girlfriend convinces me to offer it to her.

This is the Spezial Dunkel. Before I show you my pretty pictures, here's what the label looks like in the normal 0.5L bottle, which I took from Eichhofener's website:


But I got the 1L bottle, and here's what it looks like in their normal packaging, according to their webiste:

Nice wooden 6-pack box, eh?

I believe I may have gotten a special Christmas or December edition bottle with a special label emblazoned or printed directly onto the bottle, rather than a paper label, and here's what it looks like:


On the top of the bottle where the plop-top label is, it's interesting that only Dunkel Bier is printed. Also interesting is the ingredients label on the back, not for the ingredients, which are the usual and nondescript: water, barley malt, hops, yeast. No, the Best by date is interesting: 22.02.2014, or 3 months from when I got the beer, which I bet was very fresh when it was shipped in December.


Now to what it looks like, and I have to say that pics are somewhat deceiving, so I took 2 to prove this, one with the light in front of the beer, and another with the light coming through the beer.


Completely different views of the same beer, eh? The actual beer is between both those pics.

Here's their description of beer, á la marketing speak, first in German:

...and in English:​

So to Appearance: It's dark, black with dark ruby and amber tones when held up, all under a very light tan head that dissipates quickly.

Aroma: Lots of roasted and caramel malts, and a decent tart note in the nose. Quite pleasant and refreshing.

Flavor: This beer is quite similar to Eichhofener's Festbier, only more roasted malt flavors. In the front, you a strong dose of tartness (not sourness) with a slight dry, burnt umami taste lingering on the front of the tongue from the roasted malts. The center is more of the same, only even stronger than before, and on the sides finally the relief of burnt and roasted malts flood the senses. The back is where the fun begins, really, with more burntness, some licorice notes and then a lot more burnt roasted malt mixed with caramel sweetness into one umami flavor. However, it's more complex a flavor than that, finding undertones of bitter dark chocolate. It's almost like sucking on a roasted malt hard-candy. You also get the spritzy tartness in the back, as well. The aftertaste is dry, light tartness and a long lingering roasted malt flavor that stays on the tongue long after the swallow is complete.

Mouthfeel: This is both a very full-bodied, thick, typically Bayern beer, but simultaneously also has a spritzy dryness from the tartness and the yeast still popping the mini bubbles and scrubbing the tongue. Like the Festbier of Eichhofener, this is a multi-talented beer in that it could hold up well with a Torte or Kuchen, or fried chicken or schnitzel, though I'd prefer a cake with this beer I think.

Overall: It's a good, really good, almost great Dunkel Kellerbier. I like the sweet-sour affect that the roasted and München caramel malts achieve with a tartness and dryness. It's sweet, caramelly, roasted umami in spades,yet tart & spritzy at the same time, giving it a lighter, dryer feel after you're done than if it were simply a Dunkel with lots of roasted and caramel malts. Without much hops, it's quite an achievement. Though with all that, there's something missing, though I'm not sure what, but overall, it's still a really really good beer. 4.4/5.