Veltins: Pilsner Alkohol Free (German: Low Alcohol: 0.0% ABV)
Visual: Clear pale yellow. Large mounded white head. Very small amounts of small bubbled carbonation.
Nose: Clean. Slight fresh sour dough. Low amounts of bready hop character and bitterness. Soft vanilla yogurt.
Body: Vanilla toffee to yogurt. Clean. Hop oils. Light chalk touch. Low hop character and bitterness with gentle hop prickle. Slight frothy to sherberty feel with a lemon touch of flavor. Touch of greenery.
Finish: Toffee. Crushed mint leaves to peppermint. Light chalk. Jiff lemon. Vanilla.
Conclusion: This is very gentle, very smooth, with little in the way of rough edges. It’s got a moderate toffee and vanilla led flavour, and enough of that that thankfully the gentle character doesn’t make it an empty beer.
There isn’t much bitterness to this for a German pils – there is generally a very low amount of hop feel and such, though the hops do impart a gentle oiliness that definitely helps the beer.
The only rough edge to this, and kind of but not exactly a low alcohol tell, is the slight chalkiness. However while it is something that shows up in low alcohol beers it is not that harsh, nor exactly unusual in standard abv lagers so I can’t complain too much.
There isn’t a lot to examine here – it is gently sweet vanilla toffee to a slightly more neutral vanilla yogurt character. There is some restrained hop expression, and with that added you now have 90% of the experience of drinking this beer covered. That said, as a gentle drinking, sweeter end of the lager scale beer, this does do the job.
Considering the utter lack of any alcohol in this, the higher end malt styled sweetness is actually quite impressive, even if the beer is gentle overall. Doubly so when you take into account that this can’t lean on the hops to cover up the holes as many of the more showy low alcohol beers do.
So, not a special beer, but a well done low abv take on a gentle drinking sweet lager, and I can respect that.
Background: Yet another one from the Light Drinks batch I ordered of low to no alcohol beer. This one however is familiar to me. This is one of my Dads favorite low alcohol beers, so I decided it was time for me to give it a go and get a set of notes out of it. I was surprised to see I have never actually done notes on the standard Veltins on this blog. Something I overlooked. I must get on that one day. Not much else to add – went back to Garbage: No Gods, No Masters for background music. No I have still not picked up any Rammstein to act as backing music for German beers. I definitely should change that.
