Bells Beer

Brewed by Bells Brewery
Style: Pilsener
Kalamazoo, Michigan USA

Clear yellow with a big white head. Aroma of corn malt and a little hops. Malty flavor. Finishes with some hop bitterness. Drinkable.

Had this one bottled from the Binny’s Oktoberfest beertasting in St. Charles, Illinois, called "Lager of the Lakes". Very quaffable, if uninteresting. Pretty good.

Clear straw pour with a citrusy yeast and hop aroma. Flavor is grainy cornmeal, lightly bitter with dry spice, owing to Saaz i suppose. Just a vastly drinkable beer.

Transparent and magnifying pale straw-yellow in color with fizz rising to the top and feeding a soapy white head. Buttery gardenias, freesia, cotton and herbal lemon sourdough make traditional aromatic progress to a pilsner. Mild honey meets corn flakes, golden promise and oats, with a hint of spearmint leafs hanging on to the end of the nose. Quite an herbal, soapy flavor fledge, settling in with buttered sourdough, vanilla lilacs and toasted corn stalk leaves, which eventually get glazed with pale maple syrup. Effervescent indeed, and there’s a stinging quality to it as well. Cornmeal gets scattered over sun-scorched gardenias, eliciting a bit of cotton mouth in both feel and flavor. Grainy, not gritty, pushing forward with the medium-body. Clean green herbaceous noble hop machine finish is tweaked with sharp lemon juice sliding down harshly biting sourdough bread.

Batch 7613, Packaged October 2006, Sampled November 2006 Pours with a brilliantly clear, full gold color and is topped by a frothy, though quickly disappearing, initially one-finger thick, pale white colored head. The aroma is a mix of pale malt aromatics and spicy hops. Notes of soda-crackers, sweet grain and a herbaceous hops notes mix to form a bulk of the notes here. If you dig around a bit a dry, toasty, biscuit like note becomes a bit noticeable as does a touch of honeysuckle.

The taste has a reasonable fullness to it, at least for something with a name like this, it could have been like water, which it certainly is not. Still, this is light and quaffable. It has a dry perception to it that is driven by cracker-like malt notes and a nice contributing bitterness that is found throughout the flavor profile of this beer. A herbal hop character is also quite noticeable and almost takes on a minty note. This is certainly a nice beer, quite a bit more flavorful than I was expecting (I will admit to expecting it to lean more towards the macro side of things). Nicely quaffable, yet still has a certain fullness to it that allows the malt to stick to the palate. In fact the lingering notes that stick to the mouth are that of caramel and a hop bitterness. This beer strikes a nice balance between malt and hop throughout the flavor profile of this beer.

Light yellow with a frothy white head. Looks like a macro. Corny malt aroma with some light pilsnery hops and soda crackers. A little on the sweeter side. Flavor is a pleasant dry pilsner hop with some sweet backing in the finish. Not bad taste. Pretty nice.

Pours clear light yellow with a good white head. Balanced malt and hop aroma. Light palate that starts slightly sweet with just a touch of hop bitterness in the finish.

Bottle. AKA Lager of the Lakes. A very nice Pils / light lager. Crisp, earthy and lively. Beautiful color with a pretty white head - nice amount of carbonation. Not my favorite style but a very appealing beer, nontheless. Would have been an even better beer in the summer, perhaps?