This Is My Blood: Aventinus Eisbock

I made a shitty list of beer styles HERE and I'm working my way through 'em this summer, for better or worse. I'm going to catch up on a couple of beer styles that I've had in the past few days but that I didn't write about on those days due to creative conflict. I will include today's actual beer last.

Gose
(#55)
Exemplified by Sage Against the Machine

So, about that list I made. A bunch of those styles taken from Tasting Beer are listed as a "historical style" in the book. I'm worried that this means that I will have a really tough time finding them at a six-pack store or brewery. However, that label is also affixed to Gose, of which I've had a few in my time, and definitely have seen at numerous breweries. Attic Brewing Co. had one when we went there this past Friday.

Gose (pronounced "GOES-uh") was apparently pretty popular in northern Germany, especially in the town of Goslar (hence the name). It's a pretty normal beer in many regards—white beer, top-fermenting ale, very pale, very light—but one ingredient makes it completely abnormal. Salt. This fucking thing is salty. It's weird, you guys.

Weird enough that I will commit to the opinion now that I do not like goses. I can't be alone in this opinion (Pam loves 'em, though—says it tastes like a soft pretzel—so what the fuck do I know). It's probable that up until the 2017 publication date of this book, the majority of America had either never heard of a gose or thought it was definitely too weird to enjoy, and that's why it's still listed as "historical." It's not historical anymore. Local breweries are brewing it, and they are even giving them rap rock fusion pun names.

Allegedly, if you went to Goslar and requested a gose, you could indicate your preferred level of salt. I think that would probably be the only reason I purposefully order a gose: "very light on the salt, please."

Fruit Beer
(#79)
Exemplified by PYNK

Fans of Reinheitsgebot (the medieval European law that stated you can only have water, malt, hops, and yeast in your beer) stay away. Fruit beers do not abide by your shitty laws. We already talked yesterday about how these aren't "chick beers," and we also already talked about how fruit beers mostly literally add fruit juice to the beer (whereas beers with fruity aromas might just get them from the hops).

I don't think there's that much more to say, other than this is a very broad category of beers that could encompass any number of other styles. Bell's Brewing apparently makes a cherry stout (which sounds fucking amazing), which is technically a fruit beer, even though it's a stout too. We already had a Berliner Weisse that had fruit juice in it. Goses can have fruit in them as well. The overarching point, I suppose, is that maybe "fruit beer" is a specific style of beer but also not really. Count me as a reluctant fan (I like 'em, but too many give me a toothache).

Eisbock
(#40)
Exemplified by Aventinus Eisbock

This is a beer legend that has been passed around since our teenage years: "ice beer" earns the nomenclature because the beer is frozen, and the ice is taken out, leaving less water, and thus more alcohol by volume. When this was explained to us by the older kids, they were mainly referring to beers such as Keystone Ice. But as it turns out, the process is can also be found in the creation of a "fancy" beer. That beer is an eisbock.

As you can note from the name of this particular beer, "Aventinus," this is the same beer that I had on Thursday—a weizenbock, rich caramel flavor, all that good stuff—except that the ice was removed, and a much denser, darker version of that beer remained.

Considering how much I liked Aventinus Classic, I was expecting to really like the eisbock version as well. I didn't hate it, but I wasn't head-over-heels for it either. For one, the feel of it was thicker and more syrupy. It was closer to a liqueur than a beer. Also, the taste was a little more roasty than I expected, which overpowered any of the rich caramel flavor that I love so much. Finally, I guess I should've expected the alcohol-burn with an ABV of 12%, but it still caught me off guard a little bit. This shit is heavy!

There's a picture of this beer on the Wikipedia page for ice beer, so there I don't think I'm gonna find anything different about any other eisbock. But I didn't hate it, and I definitely grew to like it more as I got comfortable with it (it also paired really well with some BBQ chicken). But it's the type of beer that you just gotta know what you're getting into from the get-go.

NOTES

BEER: Aventinus Eisbock

STYLE: German Eisbock

ABV: 12.0%

BREWED BY: Weisses Bräuhaus G. Schneider & Sohn GmbH

LOCATION: Kelheim, Germany

PURCHASED AT: Foodery NoLibs

PAIRED WITH: BBQ chicken

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5

BEER COUNT: 250