Wow there are a lot of beer snobs here. What’s wrong with Heineken? Personally I can’t stand Amstel.
The rule of thumb is to start with what’s actually most popular? For all you people who think Miller Lite and Bud Light are an abomination, based on sales numbers most people don’t agree with you. :rolleyes: (and to silenus, who said not to have any Lite beer… Why?)
Also what this thread has shown you is the need for variety.
Personally when I have a party, I stock up with mostly Miller Lite, or possibly Bud Light. Then I will pick up a variety of other “high end” beers.
Different circumstances call for different beers. And sometimes the circumstance is that I don’t want to drink a heavy beer; so I’ll have Miller Lite. Other times I might want a Guinness.
I just tried Founders “Solid Gold” . It a nice lager with a 4.4% alcohol content. It may be my new summer beer. Warsteiner is tough to replace on a hot day, though.
When I host a party, I prepare lots of delicious food, taking into account the dietary needs and preferences of pretty much all of my guests, and I tell them I will have water, and perhaps mulled cider (if it’s winter) and they are welcome to bring anything else they’d like to drink.
I mean, if it’s Passover, I provide grape juice and wine, and I brew coffee for my bridge group. And if the conversation veers towards scotch, I’ll offer up what I have. and I might even buy a few cans of soda for the basement fridge. But I don’t plan to have drinks for everything people want, and rarely provide booze.
Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. They don’t have Yuengling here in the Chicago area, but it is distributed over in Indiana. I was on a work assignment in Indianapolis for three days last week and, even though I’m a craft beer kind of guy and the Indy liquor stores had swaths of craft beers to choose from, I ended up taking home a sixer of Yuengling tall boys for after-work refreshment.
Not bad. A beer and a water substitute should do you.
Enright - alight beer isn’t. Beer I mean. It is beneath contempt. Popular just means the majority have no taste buds. Beer snob? I wear the badge proudly.
And Heineken blows, except on draft within a limited range from the brewery.
Once upon a time, circa 2000/2001, I found myself in the Netherlands hungry and thirsty. I don’t think I was in Amsterdam, but my memory is fuzzy. I stopped into a cafe of some sort, not expecting much, ordered a fish & chips of some sort and grabbed a brown bottled beer (this was some sort of counter service place, as I remember.) I don’t think it even registered to me what beer I was grabbing, just that it was beer, and I just really wanted a beer. I take a sip of it, think, oh my, this is some pretty decent Dutch beer, I wonder what it is? Turns out, Heineken. Now, perhaps my desire for food and drink of any type at that point colored my impression of the beer, but I swear to God I remember it as being good. And in a brown bottle!
Heineken sold in the Netherlands is a pilsner, and a TOTALLY different recipie than the lager style Heineken sold everywhere else in the world.
A properly poured, cold draught Heineken pils in a sidewalk cafe somewhere in Delft or Den Haag on a warm summer’s afternoon is one of life’s finest simple pleasures.
That said, the Heineken lager sold in every other country on Earth is a last resort, only for when there is absolutely no better option.
(On a Heineken brewery tour many years ago I asked why they don’t export Heineken pils, but I forget what the reason the absolutely stunning young Dutch tour-guide told me)
I was in Amsterdam in January for the first time. Heineken was ok but just mediocre ok. A mass market beer without a lot of taste. I did not pick up on “this is so great, and so different from other countries.”
I’ve noticed a lot of people on vacation some where have great memories of the beer. I think it probably was a lot more the great vacation memories. Singha in Thailand, San Miguel in the Philippines being exhibit 1 and 2, your honor. YMMV
That said, I had a friend bring me back a standard Pilsner Urquell that had been recently bottled. Much much much hoppier than what I normally get in the US (hop flavors fade over time). Also my friend brought back a swing top version of Pilsner Urquell that wasn’t the standard version, and that was mighty tasty.
That’s interesting. Of course, a pilsener is a type of lager, but it does appear that there are bottles which say “lager” and others that others that say “pilsener.” And the American ones just say “Brewed in Holland” where the beer type is normally stated. Looks like the one I had, did, indeed, state pilsener.
That said, are you sure these are two different styles? Did on the tour they say they make a pilsener and a lager and only export one of them? I can’t seem to find anything definitive on the web that states they are two different formulas. The Wikipedia page simply equates the two, implying they just call the Heineken Lager beer Heineken Pilsener in Dutch. And the two major beer rating sites (which are pretty good even with international variations), don’t have a separate entry for Heineken Pilsener. So I’d be curious to know something more definitive about this, especially given that a pilsener is a type of lager.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong–it didn’t blow me away, but “mediocre” is much better than my normal experience of it.
There’s definitely risk of some of that going on. I try to control for it (I did say I was particularly hungry and thirsty, so that could have some bearing on it), and I wasn’t on vacation or anything like that (it was work), but, maybe it was the brown bottle, but it actually was a palatable beer in way I’ve never found a Heineken to be before or since. Still, wouldn’t have been one of my top choices.
I’ve never had a bottled PU which I really liked (to me, it’s about as good as a Heineken), but I lived in Hungary for several years, and the PU on draft there was particularly good. Maybe it’s in comparison to the traditional local lagers like Dreher or Arany Aszok (they have quite the craft beer scene there now), but I don’t think that’s it, either. It must have been close enough and fresh enough to the source that it was actually delicious. It wasn’t so much the hoppiness I noticed, but just the base malt flavor came out a lot more than in the bottled beers. Even the bottled PUs in Budapest didn’t taste like the draft one I would get at a particular pub.
Oddly, despite spending time here and there in the Czech Republic (ETA: Oh, wait, it’s Czechia now, isn’t it?), I never actually had a PU there, as I was busy exploring the other options. But even in Budapest the difference was clear to me from what you get in the bottled version.
