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.

Rye, Rye, Rye Derirah

The last Störtebeker beer I tried, the truly revolting Hanse Porter, went down about as well as a pissed-up Richard Keys and Andy Gray gatecrashing Germaine Greer's cocktail party. I had higher expectations though of their rye beer...

The head was thicker, more virulent and whiter if anything than a normal wheat beer. It doesn't say how much rye goes into it, but there's enough to give a spritzy taste on the back of the tongue. An interesting beer, and things got even better with the Schwarzbier. This for once had a roasty burnt taste that you sort of expect from a beer as black as the ace of spades - the ingredients lists röstmalz so that might have something to do with it. Definitely more interesting than the Kostritzer version.
A couple of thumbs up for the Stortebeker groovers, and nice to see a German brewer gouging the eye of the 'gebot for all the right reasons. Maybe focus on these two and knock the porter on the head lads - after all, it's not like British brewers make shitty versions of German styles and pret.... errrrmmm.... hang on... ahem... scrub that.

Cough Syrup

Störtebeker is a brewery I'd heard of from seeing their beers on an online retailer, and I'd been meaning to give them a try. Imagine my delight when I saw a six pack assortment in Penny Markt in Wernigerode. Why the buggery can't the Penny Markt in Munich sell stuff like this? Here's their take on a Porter, "Hanse Porter".

I'm no beer historian but I vaguely understand that when Porter was brewed in the Baltic area, at some point during the Pils revolution which swept across Europe like the Black Death, Porter there became a bottom fermented beer. I would like to postulate another event which I feel contributed to the history of this beer, which is hitherto unknown: there was once an accident at a storage depot involving a lorry load of Hanse-Porter and a lorry load of sugar. The containers were ruptured and the contents of each mixed. Afterwards nobody realised it wasn't supposed to be that sweet, and carried on brewing it with equal parts malt and sugar.
The resemblance to cough medicine is uncanny: I suggest the label should be changed to show a stern matronly figure holding out a spoon, with an exhortation to "drink it all up now, it's good for you."
Perhaps the Penny Markt in Munich knew something I didn't.