So crisp and clean, just enough heft to tickle the tongue and enough hops to give you a drying finish. Every sip leaves me wanting more. 4.5/5 stars.
A good lager is hard to find. Well, not hard to find exactly, because I know which breweries I can trust to do it well. What I mean is, they can be challenging to execute at a high level. My ideal lager should be light, crisp, and quaffable. Let’s break that down further.
Light refers to the mouthfeel, how much perceived viscosity the drink has. There are several contributing factors that I won’t dive into, but lightness in a beer is readily apparent while drinking. It should jeté across your tongue like a ballet dancer, not stomp though in clogs. Light and heavy are often used to describe this sensation because they can be perceived almost as a pressure on the tongue as the liquid moves through your mouth and down your throat. A light lager will flow quickly, unimpeded across the savannah of your tastebuds.
Crisp is a reference to the flavor of the beer, particularly its dryness. Weird term for a liquid, right? Alcoholic beverages like beer and wine are often placed on a spectrum from dry to sweet. Crisp would be pretty far on the dry end of that spectrum, giving an almost snappy sensation to the flavor. Think of how a plain rice cake tastes compared to a cookie. (Obviously the cookie tastes better, but that’s beside the point I’m trying to make!) The flavor of the rice cake seems to disappear as soon as you finish chewing, but a cookie will linger on your tongue. The same thing happens with a crisp lager, where you can hardly remember what the flavor was after you swallow each sip.
I love the word quaff. It has more restraint than chug but more movement than sip. A chuggable beer implies a need to drink it as fast as possible. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t taste good. More likely it’s because it hardly tastes like anything, and so a need arises to complete the task of drinking posthaste. A sippable beer, on the other hand, has weight and complexity. This is something that needs to be pondered, unpacked, deep dived. Then circle back, take a look from a different angle, and noodle a bit longer. Quaffable strikes a balance. It has enough going on to bring you back for a pint, or two, or three. But it doesn’t ask too much of you, or fatigue your palate, after repeated exposure. A quaffable lager is something to throw back and appreciate for quantity over quality, ideally amongst friends, because it enhances the experience you’re having instead of pulling you out of it.
Want to check out some other lagers I’ve reviewed? Try this one, or this one, or even this crazy one!
CZAF by Wayfinder Beer
A Beer a Day 