Birra Messina Cristalli di Sale

Bottle. Pours slightly hazy yellow, with a creamy head. Aroma is yeasty notes with spicy wheaty notes, cereals, hay and honey, as well as malty notes of cereals. Full body, with soft carbonation. Flavour is malts with cereals, hay, honey and yeasty minerals, as well as floral hops with grass.

Bottle 33cl. from Vico Food Box @home poured into a shaker. Misty deep golden colour, good moussy persistant white head, very sparkling, fine lacing. Aroma sweet malt, grain, touch of lemon, grassy hops, white bread, some dough. Taste medium sweet and light bitter, malty, grainy, bready, salt notes, some umami. Medium body, oily texture, average carbonation, creamy sweetbitter aftertaste, surprisingly tasty, very nice.

Przyjemny pijany lager, flagowiec z solą z Trapani będąc w Palermo i nie spróbować ich lokalnego piwa to grzech.

Bottle, 0.5l. Cloudy copper pour, huge creamy off-white head, long lasting, sticky lacing on the glass. Nice on the nose, grainy and grassy notes, bready, mild spice.

Light to medium body, soft carbonation. Smooth mouthfeel and texture, soft, slightly fizzy, chewy, easily drinkable. Nicely balanced bittersweet taste. Aroma of grains, grass, bread. Hay, some floral notes, light spice. Wheat in the aftertaste, light fruity notes. Medium lasting finish, slightly dry, light spice, subtle salty.

Pretty good actually. Refreshing.

Unfiltered pale lager flavoured with salt crystals, representing the beer's history as a Sicilian brand founded in 1923, taken over - via Dreher - by Heineken in 1988 and now produced no longer in Sicily (the brewery there was closed in 2007) but in Puglia. Thanks to my girlfriend for bringing me a bottle of this all the way from Venice! Thick and rocky, egg-white, fluffy, slowly receding but generally stable head, lightly misty warm deep golden robe with olive-greenish tinge and lots of fine sparkling; turning more hazy with sediment. Aroma of dry white bread, dry straw, freshly cut dandelion leaves, young garden weeds in early spring, pumice and baking soda - the latter doubtlessly representing those mysterious salt crystals. Spritzy onset, utterly minerally, with the minerality brought by lively effervescence being amplified by those crystals, which add again a somewhat soapy, baking soda-like effect, though in a crisp, non-obnoxious way; rounded cereally pale maltiness with a bit 'more' to it, slightly 'beefier' than your average pale lager, cracker-like as it were, with more breadiness in the finish due to the yeast residue. A mugwort- and dandelion-like hop bitterishness lingers at the back, notably more so than is averagely the case in a pale lager made by a macrobrewing company. The added salt crystals, something I never saw in a lager (only in Gose), do bring an extra layer of minerality here and are clearly noticeable in both aroma and taste, but other than this odd gimmick, this lager is quite clean, sleek and pure especially for a Heineken product. German style Kellerbier-ish unfiltered lager with a special twist to it: this was more interesting than I anticipated, and in my view deserves a slightly higher rating here.