The Out-of-Towners

Post three from Hamburg concerns all the beers not from Hamburg. There's plenty of it about, in various contexts.

The Buddelship bar has lots of guest tap space. Mashee is a Hannover brewery I hadn't heard of and they had a Broyhan on offer. This previously extinct north-German style is an antecedent of modern weissbier and this example really shares a lot in common with the contemporary style. It's cloudy orange in colour, though headless, with a chewy body and lots of banana flavour. I get a small complexity of chocolate and salt, but otherwise it's just a dense, heavy weissbier. I think I expected something more daring. Oh well.

Berlin icon Heidenpieters, a brewery I'd heard lots about but never tried, was well represented on the taps. Their (Choco) Stout is 8.8% ABV and has an interesting herb-forward Jägermeister aroma. The texture is smooth, and that matches the silky chocolate flavour. It's not sweet, however, the flavour bringing in all those herbs again with plenty of dark bitterness. The name suggests it might be a pastrified sugarbomb but it's not.

On a later visit I got to try Heidenpeters Quince Saison. This is 4.8% ABV and a dark gold colour. There's an interesting wine-like aroma, of the sweet and white sort. The flavour, conversely, powers up the hops, turning dank and resinous. The grape juice returns soon after, and then there's another flip on the end where it's dry and raspingly bitter. I like the amazing mix of contrasts here; the twists and turns it takes. It's unusual without being silly, something all too rare in this era of try-hard beers.

Modern German craft isn't the only non-Hamburger beer in Hamburg: there are loads of trad blow-ins. Hofbräu, for example, has a couple of large beerhalls in the city. In the mood for Bavarian jollity, we went to one of them.

Surprisingly, I don't have a review of Hofbräu Dunkel on here, even though I've definitely drank it in the era of the blog. Anyway, it's chestnut red in colour and absolutely lovely. You get an aniseed aroma and then a clean-tasting lager with notes of caramel, roasted grain and mixed bitter herbs. The texture is heavy and bock-like yet it makes for very easy drinking. Well, relatively, easy drinking. A halbe was enjoyable; a full litre would be harder work.

Also of interest on the menu was Hofbräu Kristall Weisse, not a style I'd associate with the brewery, despite it being Bavarian as. This is fully clear; a polished gold. There's a very full-on clove aroma and lots of clove on the flavour too. Lots. I had it in my head that kristall meant a certain amount of flavour has been stripped out by the filtration process, but this manages to retain all the fun of a proper weissbier yet is easier drinking because it lacks the hot gritty bits of a raw weizen. Suddenly I see the point.

I further indulged my new-found interest in mainstream Munich kristallweisse later with a Franziskaner Kristallklar. This was much more what I had been expecting, even though I rather like standard Franziskaner. It tastes like it has been shorn of its wholesome wheaty goodness, and what's left is a sticky, solvent-infused residue. There's all the headachey taste of a weissbier but none of the gentle pillowy fruits or grains. The kristall experiment ended here.

I hoped for better with this new acquaintance from the same stable: Franziskaner Kellerbier. It's explicitly unfiltered and "direkt aus dem Lagerkeller", so is it cool-fermented, then? Unusual for this weissbier brand, if so. My pour in an admittedly narrow glass looked relatively clear and a rich copper-amber colour. After the first sip I could still taste the hot Kristallweisse that preceded it. I needed to drain the glass and start again. Topped up, things weren't much better. It's very dull, with just a vague cereal crunch and a slight metallic hop twang of the sort you find in cheap mass-produced lagers. Which, on reflection, is probably what this is. Zero out of two for AB InBev's Munich operation today.

Last of the weissbiers for now is Herrnbräu, the one they serve in the finely appointed restaurant in the cellar of Hamburg town hall. This cloudy orange number tastes of butane and light clove. It's light-bodied, making for easy drinking, but not thin or watery with a full 5.4% ABV. It gets sweeter as it warms, introducing elements of banana and toffee. Overall it's a fairly middle-of-the-road version of the style, maybe leaning a little to the sweet side, but not by much.

The final Bavarian beer for today is Bayreuther Hell, from Bayreuth, obviously. Textbook to the point of boring, this one: sweet and bready at first, followed by a kick of spicy red cabbage. It's pretty much everything helles is supposed to be and does nothing fancy within the parameters. I liked it, of course, but it's not the sort of beer that gives itself to long screeds of sensory description. Not that there's any reason it should.

East of Bayreuth, hard by the Czech border, is Waldsassen, home of the Stiftland brewery. Altes Mädchen was pouring a beer chalked up simply as Zoigl and it turned out to have come from this place. It arrived an attractive clear gold colour, tasting of soft mineral water with gentle herbs and meadowy flowers. These build as it warms, turning to prominent lavender and violet. This is set on a crisp base of Ryvita crackers: a grain crunch complementing the bready malt base. The different elements blend together well resulting in an understated sort of excellence. I know Zoigl isn't one of those styles that's meant to be shoved into kegs and shipped up the country, but I'd make an exception when they're like this.

Saxon beer Hasseröder, an AB InBev brand, was the last beer of the trip, served at the departure gate in the airport in a handsome heavy handled halbe. It's perfectly clear with a decent head, smooth and fluffy with cakey malt and then celery and basil wafting through. I had noted it down as another well-rounded helles before I discovered the brewery calls it a pilsner. Oh well, never mind. Good lager is good lager. For relaxing airport drinking it's absolutely perfect.

Before that, on our final afternoon, we called in to Beyond Beer, a brightly-lit off licence specialising in local and international beers of the craft sort, with a selection touching on Belgium, the UK, the US and other luminaries of the current scene. There are stools and benches for drinking in, with three taps and a €1 mark-up on anything from the fridge you want to stay and pour.

I picked Vinous by Beavertown, purely on the name. I like the nascent trend for winelike beers, and this sounded interesting: a 4.3% ABV sour beer using grape must in the recipe. It poured a clear and pale red colour with no head really. The flavour was disappointingly sweet and, well, obvious: cherry and eucalyptus shout loudly at the front. Red grape juice arrives later with just a small spike of sourness, while the texture is disappointingly thin. It's OK, all things considered, but what bugged me most is that it's in no way vinous. That's not a word you can just throw around.

I had almost chosen Hollows from New York's LIC Beer Project instead, and on leaving I decided I just had to have it. It's a top-rated top-dollar double IPA of the sort many breweries, including several Irish ones, are trying to copy at the moment. I wanted to find out if the style leaders were doing anything different, a lesson that cost me €10 for 440ml. And while this was definitely a nice beer -- 8.5% ABV with juicy notes of mango and pineapple, not killed by the yeasty off-flavours trying and failing to smother them -- it demonstrated to me that Irish breweries like Whiplash are working at exactly this level. Chasing exotic rarities is fun, but there's no point in doing it when it comes to hazy double IPAs: they're not difficult for any competent brewer to turn out.

I hadn't been expecting to finish my musing on beer in Hamburg with a graffitto'd can of NYC hop juice, but here we are. I think I've shown that the city has plenty to offer the beer-curious, and I'm certain there's much more to see at a time of year when a greater number of the bars and taprooms are actually open. Go then.