Flying Dog Dogtoberfest

I want to start out this blog post by saying I don't like Oktoberfest beers all that much. However, it is Oktoberfest season, so I figured I'd give some a shot.

The beer poured a reddish copper color, darker than I expected, with a 1 finger nearly white head with some rocky foam. The head dissipated pretty quickly, leaving only a light dusting on top. The beer was very clear though, and obviously filtered since there was no yeast in the bottle.

The smell was very heavily malt dominated. I'd describe it as sweet, grainy, a little bready. It's actually reminiscent of unfermented wort before the hops are added. There doesn't seem to be any hop quality to the smell at all.

The taste initially is grainy, a little sweet, and a little nutty. It's actually kind of interesting. It's very clean, with the qualities expected of a lager beer. There's a bit of mild bitterness in the back, just enough to somewhat balance the beer out.

In the mouth the beer feels medium-light bodied, with a decent but low level of carbonation. It leaves a thick coating on the mouth, almost a little slimy. It's not as unpleasant as that sounds but not particularly enjoyable.

Overall, I thought the beer was OK. Not great, not really anything special, but it didn't taste bad. It's nice and light for sure, but I still felt it was just too sweet overall to want to have many. Like all the Oktoberfest beers I've had before, it's just not balanced the way I'd like. Considering it seems like the beer is made mostly for drinkability, it still doesn't do it for me.

- Adam

Weihenstephaner Festbier

I apologize for the lack of pictures on this one but I forgot to take any of it when we tried it and never got to it later. So I've heard a lot of good things about the Weihenstephaner brewery, and since our trip to the Outer Banks was right around Oktoberfest, we figured their Festbier would be a good pick. Specifically their plisner and hefeweissbier are suppused to be excellent.

Weihenstephaner makes the claim that they are the oldest existing brewery in the world. I'm not sure what the qualifications for this are, but they say they've been around since 1040, first as a monestary with a brewery, and then transitioning to a commercial brewery.

The Festbier pours a completely clear yellow color. It has a 1 finger airy white head that dissipates fairly quickly, but still leaves some lacing on the glass.

The aroma is not too impressive, it's mostly dominated by grassy scents and yeast. Bread is definitely in there somewhere. However I noticed there was a slight hint of spice and lemon in there as well.

The taste is also dominated by grass. The sweetness of it stays on the tip of the tongue, and there's a bitterness towards the back of the mouth. I think there was a bit of a spice flavor as well, but very muted. All in all there was nothing particularly special about the taste. Not a lot of complexity involved. I didn't taste any alcohol in it though, so the 5% ABV is well covered.

The mouthfeel is pretty thin as well. Not really any body to it, and it feels pretty watery. Despite that, it still has a dry finish.

All in all, it wasn't very good. The smell was the best part of it by far. I never went so far as to dump it, but there wasn't really any redeeming quality to it either. I'll see what other Oktoberfest beers taste like at some point in the future, but I'm hoping this is not representative of the style.

- Adam