Tasting #1: A couple of Pale Lagers

Yes my first tastings post is finally here! As I teased in my last post, I picked a few different craft lagers as well as one of the biggest examples of a non-craft, macro brewed (big name) lager: Budweiser. I'm going to try to pick a non-craft example of every style I go through in this blog so that the non or new craft beer drinker will have something to relate to, as I'm pretty sure anyone who has ever had a beer in their life has had a Budweiser. This will also allow me to compare and contrast the differences between macro and craft brewed beers. And to make these tastings less "one-sided" and as unbiased as possible, I will have my friend Corey - who is fairly new to craft beer - tasting with me to provide his input as well, so we can hopefully come up with some pretty fair judgements of the beers.

Pale Lagers

Before I go into the actual tasting, I just want to go over the kinds of aromas and flavours you can typically expect from pale lagers (light coloured lagers, the category into which both American pale lagers and Pilsners fall into). Since lager yeast ferments very cleanly, it doesn't produce the fruity esters that ale yeast does, so all of the flavour in the beer is going to come from the grains and the hops. Pale lagers tend to either have a pretty good balance between the sweetness of the malted barely and the bitterness of the hops, or else lean a little more towards the malt side. Generally the kind of malt flavours you'll get are sweet bready, biscuity (like a toasty shortbread cookie), or very light caramel flavours. As for hops, the kinds used in lagers (noble hops) generally give a grassy, herbal, floral, or sometimes even mildly spicy taste to the beer. So with these things considered, let's taste some beers!!!

Tasting

Beer #1: Mill Street Organic Lager

The view of the brewing equipment
from my seat at the Mill St. Brew Pub

This first beer is brewed by Mill Street Brewery, a craft brewery that started in the old distillery district in Toronto, Ontario in 2002. They've grown in the past decade, and now have a second location in Ottawa, Ontario. The demand for their beer also outgrew their relatively small original brewery, so they moved production of their main retail-sold beers to a larger facility nearby, and use the original brewery as a "brew pub" where they brew small batches of "limited edition" beers that you can only buy there. On top of this, they have a dining area around all the brewing equipment where you can sit and eat plenty of tasty food and drink all of Mill Street's great craft beers (I went very recently, and it was quite an enjoyable experience! I'd highly recommend it!)

Mill St. Organic Lager

But the Mill Street beer we're tasting today is the Mill Street Organic Lager. Unlike their other beers, Mill Street Organic is made from all organically grown barley and hops, which is definitely more expensive for them, but they feel the trade-off for an all organic beer is worth it. This was one of the very first craft beers I ever had, and could probably be considered one of my "gateway" craft beers. Having always been primarily a Heineken guy, when I tasted this beer I knew there was something different going on, and I loved it... so on that note, let's get to the tasting!

Smelling the beer right after pouring it, you're right away greeted with a nice light smell of freshly cut grass, a light floral quality (my co-taster described it as a "faint flower shop" smell), and then a good amount of sweet, bready maltiness. Having a sip, the first thing you taste is the sweet breadiness, followed up by a quick note of grassy bitterness, which then quickly transitions back to the clean, sweet breadiness, with an almost honey-like sweet finish. Overall the beer is crisp and sweet tasting, very refreshing and easy to drink, and (though I don't like to say certain beers are better for certain seasons) would make a nice crisp and tasty beer for a hot summer day, and at 4.2% is light enough that you could knock back a couple no problem. It's no wonder that after tasting this beer, I found it really hard to go back to my "trusty" Heineken.

Beer #2: Budweiser Lager

RICE in the ingredients list BEFORE Barley!?

What can I say about this beer that hasn't already been pounded into everyone's heads by the multi-billion dollar ad. campaigns? This beer is brewed by Anheuser-Busch, which was started in 1852 in the  United States by German immigrants Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch. As I mentioned in my second post "The Life of Beer", they brought with them the new crisp lager style of beer from Europe, and the style quickly took North America's beer market by storm. However, as time passed and Anheuser-Busch has grown into gigantic corporation (who now own MANY other brands including Bacardi, Rolling Rock, Beck's, and Shock Top) , their beer has steadily dropped further and further away from that original flavourful but crisp lager that won everyone's hearts over. This degradation of the beer has taken place over 150+ years though, and through a combination of their marketing division telling you "this is what beer should taste like" and the relative beer-ignorance of the average consumer (not their fault), how would WE today know the difference? The truth is that over time, as demand for their product got bigger and bigger, they tried to find ways to cut costs with their product, by adding "adjuncts" (anything that isn't barely, water, and hops) to their beer as filler to displace the cost of malted barley. A-B's adjunct of choice is rice, which also has the effect of thinning the beer down a lot and making it more flavourless and watery, while still keeping the same alcohol content. But hey, as long as they keep telling people that the more flavourless, cold, and fizzy a beer is the better a "beer" it is, and the people keep believing them, buying it, and lapping it up happily, isn't all well with the world?

Budweiser... As if you havn't seen it before

So let's taste the beer. I havn't had a Budweiser in years, but even when I was drinking macro-brewed beers, this was never a favourite of mine (although I did enjoy the occasional Bud Light Lime - but that's a whole different ball o' wax), so all the more important that I have a co-taster with me. Also just as a note, we're drinking this beer (along with all the other ones) at slightly warmer than refrigerator temperature (I know, not the "ice cold" that the brewers intended it to be consumed at). So upon pouring the beer and taking a whiff, I'm completely blown away by this beer. ... And no, not in a good way. Aside from smelling next to no malt or hop aroma that would identify this as beer, both my co-taster and I smell what we could only describe as "chlorinated-pond water". After taking an apprehensive sip, I'm relieved the smell doesn't translate into the flavour. The flavour is of very faint, watered-down, sweet bready malt, with no perceived hop flavour at a all. It's also really "fizzy", like a 7up or something, which is not what I'm used to in a beer. It finishes very quickly, with the bready flavour just disappearing to nothingness after maybe 15 seconds of taking a drink. Maybe this beer really should be served ice cold, where you can't taste or smell a thing from it. So my verdict on this beer is, for anyone looking for a cold, fizzy, flavourless beverage to quench the thirst on a hot day, look no further than a nice cold pint of glistening... TONIC WATER, because you'd get all the same characteristics of this beer minus the horrid chlorinated pond water smell wafting into your nose with every mouthful. Still wanna get drunk??? Throw some gin in said tonic water, and have yourself a ball. Just stay away from this swill!

Beer #3: Galt Knife Old Style Pre-Prohibition Style Lager

Galt Knife Old Style Lager

This beer is brewed by a brewery not far from me called Grand River Brewing, in Cambridge, Ontario.  The brewery was started only a few years ago by a couple in their 60s, with the vision of brewing a good selection of traditional, flavourful beers at an alcohol content below 5%. All of their beers have a distinctive full bodied, rounded, and somewhat dry feel, all stemming from the fact that they use their local water - which is naturally very hard water - for brewing, without making any adjustments to it.

I've tried a few of Grand River's other beers, but I've never tasted their Galt Knife lager before, so this is going to be a new experience for me. Smelling the beer, the first thing you smell is a nice big floral aroma from the hops, rounded out by a lightly toasted toffee-like malt sweetness, and almost a hint of tartness or honey. The smell of this beer is also a good indicator of the taste, which starts out floral, moves into a light toffee sweetness, and then quickly drops off to an awesome crisp, dry bitterness that finishes it off. It has a perfect balance between a nice toasty sweetness and a good dry bitter finish, with a pleasant aftertaste of toasted bread. Overall this was a very good lager, one of the best examples of floral hops in a beer I have ever come across, and I think the next time I reach for a lager off the shelf at the local LCBO, this will probably be the one that ends up in my basket.

Beer #4: Creemore Springs Traditional Pilsner

Creemore Springs Traditional Pilsner

The final beer of the evening is brewed by Creemore Springs Brewery, located in Creemore, Ontario (slightly south of Barrie, ON). This microbrewery was founded back in 1987, with a desire to brew European style beers with the traditional ingredients in the traditional way in an authentic copper kettle, no preservatives, no pasteurization, with water straight from the local spring. Although the company was acquired by Molson in 2005, the two entities have remained very much separate, and Creemore's beers and attitude towards brewing has not changed since it's founding.

Being a Pilsner, it can be expected that this beer will be more balanced towards the hops than the malt, but still refreshing... but let's find out. The aroma is very crisp and grassy / lightly floral, with a backbone of a drier, more cracker-like malt (like a soda cracker). The taste follows suit, starting very crisp and smooth, with a slight grassy / floral hops flavour, and a quick note of sweet, cracker-like malt with a little bit of breadiness. It finishes with a light hop bitterness on the back and sides of the tongue, and also a pleasant lingering dryness (and for those who don't understand what I mean by "dry", I just mean not sweet). Overall it's a very good beer, very clean and refreshing, and feels "fresh" (could be a result of their spring water). This would be a good beer to pair with a meal out on a patio somewhere on a hot day, as it's very refreshing, yet the flavour could stand up to and complement foods nicely.

Conclusions and Rankings:

Well this has been fun for me, as I've never really tasted beers of a similar style from a couple different breweries to compare the similarities and differences between them. It really helps you to NOTICE those differences, whereas you may not actually pick them out when you're just drinking one of the beers on it's own. All three of the craft brewed beers had their own unique qualities and tastes, and to be fair, the Budweiser had it's own "unique" qualities as well (read: AWFUL). And though (almost) all of the beers were great beers, I'm going to rank how I personally felt about them: 

1. Galt Knife Old Style Lager: It just had the perfect balance of nice floral hops, toasty toffee sweetness, and a nice crisp, dry finish, which all came together to make this the stand out beer of the night for me.

2. Creemore Traditional Pilsner: Crisp and smooth, grassy and floral, crackery malts, and a light hop bitterness with a dry finish make this a close second.

3. Mill Street Organic: Sweet and bready with a nice light grassy hop bitterness make this a very easy to drink, refreshing, and clean tasting lager that could and SHOULD easily displace any macro-brewed lager from all non-craft beer drinkers' hands.

... Was there another beer??? Oh... that was "beer"??? Ugh, fine then...

4. Budweiser Lager: Watered down bready malts, overly fizzy, no noticeable hops, and that nauseating smell of chlorinated pond water. Do yourself a favour and buy a Mill Street Organic instead.

I hope this was entertaining and maybe slightly educational for you readers, and I can only hope I've swayed some of you into picking up even ONE craft lager the next time you go to the beer store to pick up your next two-four. I'll be doing these tastings on a weekly basis from here on out, and I invite anyone who's interested and lives in the Guelph area to leave me a comment and let me know if you want to help me drink the next round of beers for my next tasting. Company is always welcome when it comes to drinking craft beers! Thanks for reading, and until next time...

Enjoy a craft brew!

- Sid Ryzebol -