Gösser Stiftsbräu

Brewed by Gösser (Brau Union)
Style: Dunkel
Leoben, Austria

Bottle 0,5l. Dark brown colour. A lasting white head. Sweet malty aroma and taste. Some chocolate in the aftertaste.

Very nice appearance with a deep, dark brown colour topped with a beige, lasting head. Sweet aroma. Taste of sweet roasted malt and dark chocolate. Vague bitter finish. A tasty beer, but perhaps a litte too sweet.
At Catweazle’s great tasting party 10.06.2006.

(12 oz bottle: Hollingshead Deli in Orange, CA) Best before Nov, 2006. So back in the early days of my beer discovery, Gösser Stiftsbrau was one of my favorite brews. Dark and malty, yum! I loved this beer so much, it was the only brewery I visited when I was vacationing in Switzerland, Austria and the Czech Republic. I even bought 4 tall Gösser pilsener glasses. Well nowadays, it’s sporting the boring and generic name of Gösser Dark Beer (yawn!), and the flavor isn’t at all like I remember it. Granted, my tastes have changed, but this beer sure seems a lot thinner in flavor and body. Still dominated by a "worty", toasty maltiness, moderately sweet, minimally bitter, but it’s lacking richness and character, and it shows a bit of breadiness in the finish. The nose has that toasty, malty, brewery aroma that I love so much, but lacks intensity. Light brown and nearly fully clear in appearance. Light-tan head pours to over an inch, gradually settling to a wide ring with very small inner diameter. Lacing is patchy, but considerable in terms of surface space covered. So it’s not as good as I remember it, but this is still a very pleasant beer that totally emphasizes that tasty malt.

Dark brown, with a medium short lived head. Some toffee malt nuttiness, but it just doesn’t have enough depth to sustain it (I guess too many stronger beers have spoilt my appreciation for a good dunkel!). Some nice roasted notes in the finish, but there’s also a lingering sweetness that cloys the palate.3/5 all round for me it seems.

"pours a dark ruby color. Aroma was of roasted malts and chocolate can carmel. A little thin but tasted of chocolate and carmel, has a little bit of a bitter finish to it."

bottle - Deep brown color, moderate head, some lacing. Nice, heavy mouthfeel, lots of roasted malt flavor, very subdued hops. Simple, decent session beer.

12 oz bottle: dark, though fairly transparent red-brown. Medium bubbled, fairly dark, tan head. Mild aroma of nuts, roasted bark and toffee. Mostly uninteresting flavours, with a strange twinge of alcohol creeping up behind the light coffee and dark toasty malts. Though the flavours were neither deep or complex, this was just what I was looking for after coming in from the snow into the Chicago Brauhaus!

I had this on tap at a German beerhall style restaurant. A very good dark beer with a nearly black color and a slight aroma of dark chocolate. An enjoyable almost sweet taste of dark roasted chocolate and caramel but a mildly bitter aftertaste. And like I said, this goes great with spatzle and wiener schnitzel.