German is as German Does
Written: Mar 30 '00 (Updated Mar 30 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good body, pretty beer
Cons: Not what it says it is; not much, really
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| beerfly's Full Review: St. Arnold Crystal Weizen |
This one punches my buttons. My beer rage buttons. St. Arnold's could have called this a wheat beer. There's nothing wrong with that, there are plenty of American wheat ales around. But they chose to label this beer auf Deutsch as "Kristall Weizen," and that leads me to expect that the beer is going to be similar to a Bavarian-type kristall; fluffy, spritzy, and packing the classic weizen esters and phenols that give aromas of banana, clove, bubble-gum, smoke, and vanilla.
You'd think after years of Widmer's "Hefeweizen" I'd know better, wouldn't you? There's very little aroma at all, what's there is somewhat grassy, maybe even a little of the creamed-corn smell of DMS. No banana, no clove, no phenolics at all. It's got an appealing darkish gold color, a bright white head that poofs up like wheat beer (well, it is a wheat beer, after all; it has the bare 50% minimum that Germans expect in a weizen) even though it dissipated pretty quickly in my freshly washed "beer-clean" weizen glass, and it has a pretty full body for its type.
But I want more than what I get, if they're going to call this a weizen. It's not fair to the consumer to call this beer by a German name and not deliver German-type beer. It's not fair to me, since I love kristall (and a local brewery, Independence, does/did one the right way). Instead I get a beer that tastes... well, you know those 'krinkle-kut' french fries you buy in the frozen foods department, that you bake in the oven and put a lot of ketchup and salt on and pretend they taste anything at all like real fries? It tastes a lot like a cold, leftover, unsalted one of those. Kind of flabby. There's some heft to it, but no real pizzazz. It's not unpleasant, there are no obvious flaws, but there's not a lot to recommend it, either.
I have this problem with a lot of American wheaties. There's just not a lot to them. There are some glowing exceptions: Wild Goose Spring Wheat is very nice with its coppery color and sharp hop bite and there are a number of good brewpub examples. But this is not one. I can find a better use for the calories in the rest of this bottle.
I probably would not have been so harsh on this one had I not been directly led to expect more, a lot more. Don't toy with my beerish affections, St. Arnold!
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
beerfly
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Member: Lew Bryson
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Reviews written: 88
Trusted by: 79 members
About Me:
One bourbon, one Scotch, one beer, eh? I'll take Kentucky Spirit, Scapa, and HopDevil.
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