Served at cellar temperature from a 500ml bottle into a stemmed glass. Unfiltered straw with a faint haze, the head soft and slow to settle.
Tettnang over a floor-malted pils base, finishing at 4.9% with 38 IBU. The restraint in that grain bill is the reason the rest of it works.
It drinks better than it smells, which is the right way round. The Tettnang shows up as flavour rather than perfume, and the finish is clean enough to make the next sip inevitable.
The whole point of a beer at 4.9% is the second and third glass, and this survives both. There is no cloying edge, no fatigue in the finish, and the hop character stays legible right through. That is harder to achieve than a big beer, and it gets a fraction of the credit.
Whatever the decoction schedule costs them in time, it shows up in the malt. There is a depth to the grain here that no amount of specialty malt shortcuts its way to.
Beers like this are why the lager section of this site exists at all. Keesmann Bräu have been making it for long enough that the consistency is no longer surprising, which does nothing to make it less impressive. If you are anywhere near Bamberg, DE, go and buy it from the source.
Bought at Vintages release (seasonal at the time of writing). Order the 500ml. The 300ml is over before it opens up.
Worth crossing the city for, and we have.
