Weihenstephaner Original Bayrisch Mild

Brewed by Bayerische Staatsbrauerei Weihenstephan
Style: Dortmunder/Helles
Freising, Oberbayern, Germany

**Highly underrated** Pours bright, pale yellow w/ a full, creamy froth. Good head retention reveals a silky canopy w/ a few spattered islands and a full ring of lace. Aromas of fresh malts and herbs. Medium nectar w/ ample soft residual effers. Texture is close to cream. Flavors are bright, crisp and clean w/ delicious vanilla cream, citrus nectar, and mild herbs. This has got to be the best tasting lager I’ve ever had. The finish has a most excellent bittering component keeping me in the ready for another sip. Overall: flavorful and well balanced with none of the typical skunky flavors present in most lagers. Thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommended.

Don’t know what to make of this one. Pours a near white with a white head. Looks like it would glow in the dark. Smells lightly of lemons and little else. Taste is maly and somewhat breaddy. Where’d the lemon hints go?

Decent aroma with artichoke, grain, light hops, a touch of stale bread. Way too pale with not enough head to warrant any kind of decent score for appearance, though champagne style bubbling is nice. Flavor is very dull, with a bread, a touch of artichoke, lots of piss. Palate is very thin and watery with little carbonation.

The aroma is sweet and malty along with nice hops and a not so nice paper and glue smell. The appearance is pale gold with a medium persistent head. The flavor is like so many German beers. It’s crisp, malty, and bitter but this one is also a wee bit sour. The palate, as with everything about this beer, is average for the style.

01-Jan-06 (500 ml bottle: $2.49 at BevMo in Oceanside, CA) Finally getting to retry this beer, and now we’re talking! This bottle is much better, much more like how I remember it. Plenty of bready malts leading the way, with prominent, grassy-tasting hops contributing a moderate bitterness and solid balance for the malt. The nose is very bready and grainy, but lacks the hops aroma you’d expect given it’s prominence in the flavor. Body is light-medium with good carbonation. Pale golden in color, showing perfect clarity, topped by an inch of white, fluffy head. Retention is decent, taking several minutes to fade to a ring. Though not as solid as my prior notes seem to indicate, this beer is still enjoyable enough. Probably wouldn’t buy it again though.

02-Sep-04 (500 ml bottle: $2.49 at BevMo in La Jolla, CA) I purchased this today, but I’m suspecting this bottle had been on the store shelf for awhile, as the beer seems a bit musty and has a mild cardboard flavor. Also, the palate is a quite flat and lifeless, and the beer appears still, having no head and no carbonation bubbles rising through it. I rated this a few years ago, however, and it was pretty solid all around. The positives are all still there, even in this bottle, but some substantial negatives such as the cardboard flavor and flat palate are cropping up that I didn’t notice in previous tastings. Previous notes indicate a nice balance between a flavorful, bready maltiness and a mild hops bitterness. Sweet, malty and very bready nose both then and now. Pale golden color and fairly hazy. Definitely deserves a rerate because I know this beer can be much better. Ratings are estimates for previous tastings until I can retry this beer.

Deep clear gold. Applesauce and ginger over sweet malt. Thin-bodied but nice.

The aroma was a little yeasty with a slight doughy smell. The appearance was golden and fizzy at first with a white head that was fully diminishing. The initial taste was slightly sweet and then left a slightly bitter taste in the back of the mouth. The taste was long lasting. This is my first review.

The aroma was a little yeasty with a slight doughy smell. The appearance was golden and fizzy at first with a white head that was fully diminishing. The initial taste was slightly sweet and then left a slightly bitter taste in the back of the mouth. The taste was long lasting. This is my first review.