Beer Advent Calendar Window Eight

Beer Advent Calendar Window Eight - Winterfestbier

There's a point in these calendars where the soul starts to be ripped from your liver. All the beginning good intentions - to give background on the brewery and beer with each post - are ripped from you. Before you've even had chance to send an e-mail with a polite enquiry, you are drinking, writing and reviewing with no background knowledge.

With that, we come to Window Eight and Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei Winterfestbier. This beer was purchased late last year and is certainly included due to its beautiful Christmas themed label and name.

Apart from that I know next to nothing about this brewery or beer and a non-negotiable website doesn't educate me. I would love to show my journalistic skills in these posts, but I personally like diving into this unknown German entity with no expectations or knowledge. Please stick with this Advent Calendar, if not for the detailed beer information and world class tasting notes then at least the entirely pointless Christmas film quote...

"Aren't we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? You know ... the birth of Santa."

Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei - Winterfestbier 5.3%

This is a lovely beer to look at, glazed in your glass like opaque clementines and fizzing away. There's plenty of orange peel on the nose with suggestions of clove and nutmeg. The flavour really brings out that orange along with whole coriander seeds, light liquorice and a little star anise. There's a strong hint of honey wafting through in later stages, next to professionally made marmalade. A little winter spice in a tub of marmalade creates the backbone to this beer. Despite an expected pilsner style, carbonation is low, allowing orange zest to wash over your tongue for a final finish. Forget the RateBeer scores, this is a surprisingly tasty bottle of festive beer.

Mince Pie Rating: 6/10 - a small nibble and those orange flavours really become apparent.

Best paired with: the satsuma everybody should still receive at the bottom of their stocking.

Comments

"They Had Their Issues, So..."

There’s a set of garages to rent as storage units near my workplace. One of them is taken by a local florist that uses it to store flower arrangements for various events, that are more often than not funerals. As such, at least once a week at 8am I will pass a car being loaded up with flowers arranged into heart shaped patterns or the letters M U M. It is a grounding reminder that, as I mentally grumble my way through the upcoming arbitrary grievances of my ordinary working day, a group of family and friends locally is going through the hardest time. It provides much needed perspective on days when I could do with being reminded of all that I have to be thankful for. These little moments explain to me why it is possible for us to share a communal loss when a celebrity passes away. Grief is often a personal and lonely experience, shared between a minority of people in your life. When a co-worker loses a relative or friend, it has little affect on me, bar signing of

LIVERPOOL - the City that Craft Beer Forgot Part II (and found...)

After visiting Liverpool, one of my favourite cities, in February this year, and not impressing people with my rather hasty but honest verdict on the city’s lack of craft beer, I jumped at the chance to return last week and hoped to come out with a more attractive judgement. A couple of friends and I visited on a day out, with neither of them having been drinking in the city before. It was left to me – or rather, I volunteered – to plan the day’s itinerary and places to visit. I had a couple of new or unvisited places in mind myself, but knew it would be unfair to miss out on some of the city’s famous gems. With around 10-12 hours in which to fit in an entire city, I opted to concentrate on the famous Georgian Quarter and see if we had time for the Dale Street end later on. We planned to arrive in the city for around 11a.m. just in time to walk up Mount Pleasant to the new-on-me, though I believe it has been opened three years, Clove Hitch on Hope Street for breakfast.

Advent Calendar Window 14 - La Goudale de Noel

"Keep my distance, but you still catch my eye, Tell me, baby, do you recognise me? Well, it’s been a year, that doesn’t surprise me" La Goudale is an interesting French enigma. I searched for this under the label Brassee a L’Ancienne believing this to be the name of the brewery. After some fruitless searching, I learnt that this is not the name of a brewer, but rather a French saying that, roughly translated, means “Brewed in a Traditional way.” La Goudale is actually from the Brewery Gayant based in Douai, North-east France that aleso houses other well-nown brews such as Amadeus and La Biere Du Demon. The real reason I find them an enigma though is for the discovery the other day that two of their beers – the Abbey and Wit – are sold in Aldi. They are in 750ml bottles and are £2.49 and £1.99 respectively. Housed here, the repugnant snob in me thinks they look cheap and unappetising on these shelves and managed to slightly put me off my La Goudale

Beer Compurgation

Search This Blog