German Beer

[Viva la FCB+]

On 26/12/2021 at 04:39, Stan said:

May I join you fine drinkers

 

 

I likey. 

[nudge]

26 minutes ago, Coma said:

Here's my setup for New Year's.

Nice. I'm destroying my NYE stash right now

[Coma+]

I'm drunk on Laphroig right now lol

[Coma+]

@Tommy I found Uerige in DC. Gonna celebrate style. 

[Coma+]

Can't speak lol

[Coma+]

God I'm wasted lol

[Coma+]

None of 5his is German but I'm fucked up lol

[Coma+]

3 hours ago, Tommy said:

Uerige!  

Gotta celebrate the champion beer!

[Tommy]

4 hours ago, Coma said:

@Tommy I found Uerige in DC. Gonna celebrate style. 

Representing Düsseldorf in DC, nice! 

Hope your hangover won't be too bad. 

[Coma+]

15 hours ago, Tommy said:

Representing Düsseldorf in DC, nice! 

Hope your hangover won't be too bad. 

Felt like absolute hell this morning. We are visiting my wife's family outside Washington DC and went to buy a bunch of drinks for NYE. Ended up emptying a bunch of older bottles to make room for the new.

[Coma+]

@TommySo I didn't expect the Uerige to have chocolate notes in it. Tasted more like a stout? It was good though.

[Tommy]

3 hours ago, Coma said:

@TommySo I didn't expect the Uerige to have chocolate notes in it. Tasted more like a stout? It was good though.

Did you check the expiry date? Chocolate notes? What the hell. And Stout? Like Guiness? No way. Guiness tastes like if you mixed Altbier with water. 

[Rucksackfranzose]

30 minutes ago, Tommy said:

Did you check the expiry date? Chocolate notes? What the hell. And Stout? Like Guiness? No way. Guiness tastes like if you mixed Altbier with water. 

Well, to be perfectly honest my old home mates and me organized a lot of parties with expired beers, since they were much cheaper than other ones. Believe me, beer is much more durable than the expiry date suggests, if you stock it appropriate.

[nudge]

Beer expiry date, fuck me. It stays good for ages

[Coma+]

3 hours ago, Tommy said:

Did you check the expiry date? Chocolate notes? What the hell. And Stout? Like Guiness? No way. Guiness tastes like if you mixed Altbier with water. 

The first thing I tasted was chocolate. It was also darker in color than I expected. Maybe they bottled the wrong product.

[Tommy]

4 hours ago, Coma said:

The first thing I tasted was chocolate. It was also darker in color than I expected. Maybe they bottled the wrong product.

It is darker yes. Maybe your brain somehow saw the colour and connected it to chocolate?  I honestly don't know where the chocolate taste is supposed to come from. 

 

And yes, of course you can drink beer that is years old. But it starts to taste flat after a while. Especially if you drink beer from a local brewery and not from one of those big industrialized mega breweries. 

[nudge]

5 hours ago, Tommy said:

And yes, of course you can drink beer that is years old. But it starts to taste flat after a while. Especially if you drink beer from a local brewery and not from one of those big industrialized mega breweries. 

Yeah, understandable, but the very thought made me chuckle, I don't think I have ever looked at the expiry date on a beer bottle

As for chocolate notes, I can kinda understand where @Coma is coming from. I haven't had Uerige, but I find all Altbier pretty malty, and for me, that taste is related to chocolate and caramel notes...

[Tommy]

Prost! 

[Dr. Gonzo]

Any of you had any of Stone's German beers?

Stone's a San Diego brewing company primarily, probably the biggest one here. They're not my favourite, but they've got some good beers. They've also opened up a brewery (or something) in Munich and apparently brew a very different sort of beer to their usual beers there.

I've always been interested, but being in San Diego it's obviously much easier to find Stone's local beers than anything they make abroad.

[Tommy]

11 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Any of you had any of Stone's German beers?

Stone's a San Diego brewing company primarily, probably the biggest one here. They're not my favourite, but they've got some good beers. They've also opened up a brewery (or something) in Munich and apparently brew a very different sort of beer to their usual beers there.

I've always been interested, but being in San Diego it's obviously much easier to find Stone's local beers than anything they make abroad.

Is that it? https://www.stonebrewing.com/

[Dr. Gonzo]

23 minutes ago, Tommy said:

Is that it? https://www.stonebrewing.com/

Yeah that's them... looking around on their website I found this:

https://www.stonebrewing.com/blog/venues/2019/farewell-stone-brewing-berlin

so it was Berlin, not Munich and... looks like they've packed up and abandoned the plan. Looks like Brewdog, a maker of terrible beers, has taken over their facility. At some point they had taken over distribution for most of the San Diego local craft beer scene (beer is absolutely massive here, the city is obsessed with tasty beers) and I think that spread their resources too thin - they've had to roll back their distribution locally, so I'm not surprised they had to abandon their German operations.

Shame, really, I was very interested to see what Stone's German brews were like.

[Tommy]

7 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Yeah that's them... looking around on their website I found this:

https://www.stonebrewing.com/blog/venues/2019/farewell-stone-brewing-berlin

so it was Berlin, not Munich and... looks like they've packed up and abandoned the plan. Looks like Brewdog, a maker of terrible beers, has taken over their facility. At some point they had taken over distribution for most of the San Diego local craft beer scene (beer is absolutely massive here, the city is obsessed with tasty beers) and I think that spread their resources too thin - they've had to roll back their distribution locally, so I'm not surprised they had to abandon their German operations.

Shame, really, I was very interested to see what Stone's German brews were like.

Never heard or seen about Stone's hear, unfortunately. And now I'm intrigued.  

I've seen Brewdog cans at my local Aldi though. The can design looked tacky as fuck. 

[nudge]

8 minutes ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

Yeah that's them... looking around on their website I found this:

https://www.stonebrewing.com/blog/venues/2019/farewell-stone-brewing-berlin

so it was Berlin, not Munich and... looks like they've packed up and abandoned the plan. Looks like Brewdog, a maker of terrible beers, has taken over their facility. At some point they had taken over distribution for most of the San Diego local craft beer scene (beer is absolutely massive here, the city is obsessed with tasty beers) and I think that spread their resources too thin - they've had to roll back their distribution locally, so I'm not surprised they had to abandon their German operations.

Shame, really, I was very interested to see what Stone's German brews were like.

From the page you linked:

"We started Stone in 1996 because we weren’t OK with the status quo of beer in the U.S. We felt Americans deserved better, so we brewed it for them. When we saw much of Germany stuck in a similar status quo of cheap beer, we were convinced we could help. As it stands now, German beer prices are the cheapest in Western Europe. As most of us know from life, the best things are rarely the cheapest.

Amazing beer is being brewed by amazing brewers all over the country. Unfortunately, according to the stats, most Germans are still ignoring these wonderful beers and buying the cheap stuff."

 

What a load of bollocks. Yes, cheap supermarket macro beer is popular and might have the largest percentage of sales countrywide, but they completely missed the fact that millions of Germans usually buy their traditional local beer that has been brewed there in their specific region using the same ingredients and recipes for hundreds of years. Those beers might still be "cheap" compared to some other Western European countries, but just because it isn't some fancy overpriced stuff with shiny modern designs, doesn't mean it's bad  Quite on the contrary... Hell, even plenty of cheap German lagers taste great and are often brewed by smaller independent breweries. If they didn't know that German stubbornness and loyalty to their local regional beers is a huge part of German beer culture, then their market research must have been piss poor. It's very optimistic and naive (to put it mildly) for an American brewery to expect their over-hopped craft style beers to be able to compete with well established old style German beers in Germany, in my opinion. Especially in Berlin, where there's also a shitload of German microbreweries selling craft style beer for probably half the price. 

[Dr. Gonzo]

2 minutes ago, nudge said:

From the page you linked:

"We started Stone in 1996 because we weren’t OK with the status quo of beer in the U.S. We felt Americans deserved better, so we brewed it for them. When we saw much of Germany stuck in a similar status quo of cheap beer, we were convinced we could help. As it stands now, German beer prices are the cheapest in Western Europe. As most of us know from life, the best things are rarely the cheapest.

Amazing beer is being brewed by amazing brewers all over the country. Unfortunately, according to the stats, most Germans are still ignoring these wonderful beers and buying the cheap stuff."

 

What a load of bollocks. Yes, cheap supermarket macro beer is popular and might have the largest percentage of sales countrywide, but they completely missed the fact that millions of Germans usually buy their traditional local beer that has been brewed there in their specific region using the same ingredients and recipes for hundreds of years. Those beers might still be "cheap" compared to some other Western European countries, but just because it isn't some fancy overpriced stuff with shiny modern designs, doesn't mean it's bad  Quite on the contrary... Hell, even plenty of cheap German lagers taste great and are often brewed by smaller independent breweries. If they didn't know that German stubbornness and loyalty to their local regional beers is a huge part of German beer culture, then their market research must have been piss poor. It's very optimistic and naive (to put it mildly) for an American brewery to expect their over-hopped craft style beers to be able to compete with well established old style German beers in Germany, in my opinion. Especially in Berlin, where there's also a shitload of German microbreweries selling craft style beer for probably half the price. 

I think that's just marketing bullshit to try to get people to buy their beers.

I agree with you, nothing wrong with cheap beers - especially cheap German beers that are really good.

I dunno if their beers in Germany were meant to be the same as their American beers - I remember reading that they were going to try to make beers in a traditional German styles with a bit of a San Diego twist to it (which, I think ironically one of San Diegos better breweries - and one of it's oldest ones - already does... but in San Diego... and generally makes better beers than Stone; but they were founded by a German brewer).

I wouldn't put it past them to have shit market research though. I think Stone is a decent beer company, some of their beers are very good - some of them are totally shite... but they've made some weird business decisions in the last 5-10 years.

But when they've tried making beers in other regional styles, I think they've done a good job. They've got a Mexican lager that is absolutely phenomenal, the best Mexican lager I'd had until I went to an independent brewery in Tijuana which had the best lager I've ever had in my life, they had a beer that used Hawaiian hops (which I can now verify, actual Hawaiian beer is brilliant - I dunno how/why hops grown there taste different, but they are great - Maui Brewing Co. was a great brewery tour) and it was one of the more interesting beers I've had in my life to this day.

So I'd have to guess that their German style beers were quite tasty. Dunno if they're as good as other independent brewers in Germany, and probably not.

One thing San Diego breweries are definitely guilty of... at least in their marketing... is acting like they're gods gift to beer and that no other country/city does craft beer. And in some respects, I think the beer scene in San Diego is fucking brilliant and unlike other places in the world. In other respects, it's just arrogant as fuck to assume there's no other independent brewers anywhere else in the world.

Particularly in Germany, a country that's famous for tasty beer 

[Dr. Gonzo]

32 minutes ago, Tommy said:

Never heard or seen about Stone's hear, unfortunately. And now I'm intrigued.  

I've seen Brewdog cans at my local Aldi though. The can design looked tacky as fuck. 

I've never had a Brewdog beer I really liked.

Everyone's got different tastebuds, so I wouldn't say "don't try it" ... but I think they're a shite brewery