Büttner Vollbier
Brewery: Büttner
Town: Untergreuth
Style: Vollbier
Color: in krug so no visuals
Head: white, creamy, thinning
Nose: grainy
Body: medium
Palate: balanced, fruity, grainy, underlying hops
Finish: lingering, semi-dry
Served: on tap at the brewery
Impression: The first time I stopped by it was jammed. Threw down a beer to get my driving wife out of a hectic scene. Came back a year later to find it unexpectedly closed on a Saturday. Was ecstatic when a friend offered to drive and I got to settle into a few beers and some excellent Brotzeit. The beer has no visuals but is very much a Krug beer. Have to return in colder month to see it in a glass one day. A request for such went with a shrug and negative relpy. It’s nonetheless a semi-dry fruity quaffer with a lingering moreish finish.
Next beer or back to the beer list.
Rich, I get the impression – which may not be accurate – that when in the posts when you do give the ABV – that the beers in Bavaria tend to have lower alcohol content than the Pacific NW craft brews. It is typical here to see an ABV between 6.0 and 7.0 and nobody thinks anything of it. If I remember correctly, in one of your last few posts, you mentioned that a 5.4 (I think) was fairly high. Just thought I would ask the expert! Cheers
I generally give the ABV if I know it, Don. Last year, I drank more bottled beer due to everything being closed. Of course, this information is readily available on the bottle. While I am back out and about, I now tend to pick up bottles (what I can carry back in my backpack anyway!) that are either not on tap or I just didn’t have time to try (often Weissbiers) so I have the info for those. More often than not, in small breweries, they just don’t provide info of any kind. To be fair, most beer hovers around 5%. It’s always been the benchmark percentage. The feeling here is you want a beer you can drink a fair amount of without getting drunk. In Biergartens, you can only get liter mugs (at least at night) and obviously drinking stronger beer in that size vessel is dangerous. I know, during Starkbierzeit, they serve 7-8% beers in such measures. So, you have you have some stronger beers (Bocks, Doppelbocks, Festbiers) but generally speaking, it’s about 5. If anything is really missing here, it’s lower octane offerings like Schankbier which is more in the 3-4% range. In England, you still find things like Milds, though less so than in former times. It’s nice to be able to go out and drink 8-9 beers and not get really drunk. Have a look at my Beer Styles section, where you’ll get a feel for the ABV of various styles here.