Okanagan Spring: Bavarian Lager
Most beers in North America suffer from two key problems in being good Lagers (as drunk in Germany):
- Beers are being pastereuised in order to make them more durable for transport over large distances.
- Corn is a key ingridient in a lot of the large batch brewing operation
Both really doesn’t do a lot to improve the taste of beer. Be it Canadian, Blue or Coors, in essence they are all the same beer, brewed strong and just watered down to the desired alcohol content. Especially when it comes to light beers I could not tell you the difference between a Coors light and a Canadian light (both brewed by Molson) or even Blue light (brewed by Labatt).
Okanagan Spring Brewery is a small brewery located, as the name suggests in the Okanagan and their Bavarian Lager is notably different from the Labatt and Molson offerings.
First of all the brewery claims to adhere to the Reinheitsgebot, which means for one thing that there won’t be any corn to be found in it.
Secondly, and that may make the biggest difference, it is not pasteurized. This clearly helps the taste (think of how Homo Milk tastes differently from the “normal” stuff).
This yields a full bodied Lager. Most Lagers I am not really a fan for, they tend to taste like “water” (and heck, I can drink water instead), there is a distinctive note of the hops and the beer itself also has a pleasant aroma.
I am more of a fan of darker Ales, Stout or Alt, but this is a Lager I truly enjoy on a hot summer day.
Rating: 4/5
This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.