Two in the Loo

I spent a large part of tonight on the bog, due to a dodgy fish curry I had eaten the night before. But even diarrhoea doesn't put me off my quest to find interesting German beer. A Störtebeker Pils and Pinkus Weissbier should be just the tonic...

The Störtebeker kept up their good form, with a late bitterness that is unusual in bland Bavarian Pils. A very flavourful example and it's a crying shame I can't buy these in any shops here. Apart from their disasterous porter Störtebeker really are a fine bunch of geezers.
The Pinkus Weissbier was a bit of a let down though. I don't know if I had a dodgy example, the top seemed to come off slightly too easily, but there was practically no head, and none of the flavours you associate with Weissbiers. I'll stick to their Altbier in future which is far better.

More Bio

The Heller's brewery in Cologne was described by Michael Jackson as a "maverick", and representing one of the new generation of German brewpubs from the 1980s. This Kolsch is apparently the filtered form of another of their beers called Wiess (indicating a 'meadow' beer, nothing to do with Weiss, a wheat beer).
Remembering this, I was well chuffed when I spotted this in the Bio shop I found a few weeks ago. I've only tried a couple of Kolschs and both were pretty much a waste of space, but I'll wait till I try it in a pub in Cologne before condemning the entire style.

When you're used to German beers which very heavily favour the malt over the hops, any sort of bitterness comes a pleasant surprise, and this one pleasantly surprised me. Michael Jackson stated that in this version the hops were more subdued than the Wiess, so if I spot that anywhere I'm leaping on it straight away and stuffing it down my trousers before some other cad gets his mits on it.
Next was another Pinkus, who make the exceedingly decent Pinkus Alt.

Definitely more going on in there than your bog standard German pils, but coming after the Heller's it didn't quite match up. I'll still try more Pinkus whenever I see them though.
With Pinkus Alt and Heller's Kolsch I now have two very drinkable beers I can get cheaply here without having to get pricey internet beer - though it's as weird as a bottle of chips that I have to go to a Bio shop to find them.

Super Bio-Test 85

"Bio" stuff in Germany is even more popular than moustaches, and there is a Bio-shop I walk past every day, without ever having had the slightest inclination to go inside. Today for some reason a mysterious force sucked me in, and to my surprise I found a large range of interesting looking beers.
Due to the limited range of bio ingredients, particularly hops, bio-beers are rarely popular, but my eyes were drawn to one, Pinkus Alt, by the word "obergarig" splashed across it . It's top-fermented Jim, but not as we know it - in Germany it's nearly always accompanied by a cold maturation, which can often lead to it being scarcely distinguishable from a lager.
I'd only drunk one Altbier before, the divine Uerige-Sticke, which those splendid fellows at Bierkompass can sometimes get their mits on. As I paid the Biocashier the pleasingly low 99 cents and scratched my Bioscrotum I pondered on whether the bio nature of the bier would prove much of a drag factor.
The first suprise was the colour - for some reason I'd got the idea in my head that all Altbiers were dark. Still, it had a nice frothy head while it lasted and a nice golden colour.

By this stage I wasn't surprised that it tasted towards the lager range of the spectrum, but that didn't matter a hoot because it was damned nice, combining the crispness of a good lager with some nice yeasty bready fruity type stuff.
The number of German beers I try that I intend to repurchase can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but if other Pinkus beers are like this I may have to become a deformed freak.