6.4/10
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Appearance 6
Aroma 7
Flavor 7
Texture 6
Overall 5.5
"Münchener Helles", the ’commercial’ answer to the world’s oldest Lager style back in the 19th century, from a brewery situated in Maxlrain (and named after it as is custom in old German beer tradition), some thirty or forty miles to the southeast of Munich and allegedly this brewery’s flag ship Lager. From a sixpack with local Munich-area beers, big cheers to Glenn for bringing me this lovely box - amidst all that present-day craft beer violence, it still feels good to ’retreat’ into a completely traditional European beer like this one. If it is well-made, that is, so time to find out: medium thick, nicely ’continuously’ lacing, snow white head with very good retention, initially frothy and generous but ending in a firm moussy rim and a white veil in the middle only showing gaps very slowly; underneath shines a perfectly cristal clear, pure straw blonde beer with warmer golden hue and a couple of loose translucent yeast bits here and there - but just a couple really, as in any semi-’artisanal’ (or rather: not exaggeratedly industrial) pale lager. Classic Helles aroma of old dry cookies, damp cloth, sweetish white bread dough, white sweetclover flowers, something paper glue pen-like, wet straw, green apple peel, fresh lettuce hearts even - simple, but nothing really off-putting, industrial or otherwise. Pretty neutral start, malt sweetness apparent quite rapidly and spreading onwards towards the finish as a straightforward, cereally, vaguely sweetish background against which a few things happen: minerally, spritzy carbonation at first, laying fresh mineral water-like notes on the tongue without ever becoming overcarbonated or numbing; a lean, slick and eventually almost glue-ish mouthfeel; and, importantly, a grassy and floral hop accent in the end, hovering discretely above the malt sweet finish but still adding a subtle bitterness to it as well as a very faint floral aroma retronasally. This is a textbook example of a Helles: clean, clear, not overindustrialized, native to the region where the style originated, straightforwardly malty and in that sense sweetish with only the slightest noble hop accent in the tail to balance out the pale malt sweetness. Münchener (or other) Helles will never be the most exciting beer style, this is a style that was already restrained in the 19th century compared with the crispier, hoppier Pilsener style - likely the reason why it never achieved the same amount of fame, by far - but in this particularly simple and unambitious context, it all comes down to balance, accuracy and ’truthfulness’ and in that particular sense, this beer performs perfectly. This is all I would expect from a typical Helles, nothing more, nothing less - I had worse ones than this even from Germany. I can understand how this managed to earn a gold medal in its category multiple times - if you look at it from a traditionally European, classically (not to say 19th- and 20th-century) point of view. One I’d recommend as an introduction to people interested in getting to know classic German Lager styles.
Tried
from Can
on 12 May 2017
at 17:17