Tag: pilsener

Not a regular customer for Goose Island, since i think it may be a zombie craft brewery, eaten and digested by one of the major commercial brewers. And not a regular pilsener drinker, they just don’t have the bite nor the heft that i look for in a pricey beer. A fun side-note: their phone number is 1800-GOOSEME. But, to round out a pick-your-six this was the best non-IPA goose left, so let’s see if it turns out to be a duck instead.

Label calls it at 5.1% alk and 44 IBU’s, but the label also says it’s a lager… they must be considering the pils malts in the naming here. Very bright and clear color, spot-on golden. Blurb says it’s got “crisp hop aroma” and “clean & refreshing finish” and the first one at least is true. The smell is good hoptown, citrus with a layer of composting straw, if you know that pungent smell you’ll know what i mean, and if you don’t you’ll think that’s nasty, but it really isn’t a bad smell.

The taste bears out the rest of the blurb, i would call this crisp on the back end, but also crisp right up front as well. In fact, the attack is crisper than the finish, which is a little more wet. No mention of which variety of hops used, but they do come from their own hop farm in Idaho, which is a ways away from the three brewing locations listed: Baldwinsville NY, Chicago IL, and Fort Collins Colorado.

Not a bad beer, i’ll rate it as if it is truly a lager, in which case it’s pretty darned hoppy, and the malt body is not as punchy as one would like in a lager. Like the hoppiness but would like more weight, this beer seems more trendy than serious. Rates a 6.7 for not sucking terribly.

Another crafty brew from the enormous and otherwise uncrafty Genny Brewery. To lift a wet finger to the beerworld winds, it seems like the craze for IPAs is dwindling down, and the next craze, though uncertain at this date, might just be Pilseners. Crisp light-body beers, lower in strength than IPA, lighter in hops, and all that makes the brewer’s art stand out in higher relief.

This here is a good example, though i admit that i have not been jumping all over the Pilsener wagon, but this is indeed crisp, lightly hopped and low-alk at 5.0%. As said before, i prefer a lager, so in the dark ages before crafts, i’d usually go for the lager Bud over the pilsener Miller. The pils heartland in America was always the Upper Midwest, where North Germans settled heavily… think Milwaukee and Detroit.

So with my limited comparison skills, this brew blows the doors off of the Miller i know and remember. This is hoppier, likely a nod to the current fashion in overall brewing, and it’s got real beer taste, which an 80s megabrewer had to forego in the rush to get as much beer as possible out onto the loading dock.

I like this, but at $9 for a sixer, and being neither a lager nor IPA, i probably won’t buy it again. Plenty of things i totally adore are only a buck more per 6. All considered, i can give this a hearty 7.0 for quality and for killing the preconceived notion of a pilsener, even though they spell it “Pilsner” on the label, heh.