Maibock

Tin Mill is a brew pub I'd heard good things about. They're located in Hermann, the heart of Missouri wine county, which much nicer than it sounds... Starting earlier this year Tin Mill has started bottling some of its beer and sending it to the far reaches of the Show Me State. I picked up this bottle in Saint Louis earlier this summer when I wasn't exactly in a hurry to drink a Maibock, so this bottle sat in the basement for three months or so. Well, the weather is cooling pretty rapidly and another daylight savings time is nearly upon us, so I figured it was high time I open up this Tin Mill Maibock and see what I've been missing in Hermann.

Rogue is one of those breweries which people say a lot of great things about. Word of mouth still goes when convincing consumers to buy your product. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about Rogue so I keep trying their beers in hopes that I'll understand what people see in them. My most recent attempt to understand the Rogue hype is this bottle of John John Dead Guy Ale. This bomber is a collaboration of sorts, it's basically just Dead Guy Ale aged in whiskey barrels. The cool part is that the barrels held Dead Guy whiskey. It's a neat anecdote but I'm not an expert on whiskeys so it doesn't mean a whole lot else to me.

If you're from the Kansas City area you know all about Tom Pendergast, the Democratic party boss who ran Kansas City during the Great Depression. Pendergast, though corrupt, is remembered affectionately a Robin Hood type who fed the poor, indirectly gave rise to the Kansas City jazz scene and was responsible for putting Harry S. Truman on the national political stage. What's this all have to do with beer? Well, Pendergast's faction was referred to as goats... an animal often associated with the Bock style. Bock being the German word for a "buck" or any large male animal. The correlation is tenuous at best...

Dundee's Pale Bock is an interesting take on the Bock style. Based on the name and the picture on the label I was expecting something a bit more like Mahr's Weisse Bock. Mahr's Bräu's Weisse Bock was a combination of a Weissbier and a Bock style lager. The name essentially means the same as Dundee's "Pale Bock" so I was expecting a dark Bock beer with lighter, citrus and sour flavor. Dundee's Pale Bock is actually quite different, it's a lighter style Bock. What I mean by that is this beer is nearly yellow in color, around 6% ABV and infinitely drinkable. The Pale Bock looks a lot like a filtered filtered Wheat Beer, it has a clear yellow/orange body with a very thin head. The aroma coming off of this beer is amazing, it's very sweet like butterscotch candies and warm bread. In many ways, this beer is the opposite of Mahr's Weisse Bock.

Primátor's Maibock comes in a very unassuming bottle. Looking like it hasn't seen a redesign since the last major war in Europe, you'd certainly be forgiven if you didn't give this beer more than a second glance at the store. Once you take a good long look at this boring label you'll notice the fine print above the Primátor name says, "2008 World's Best Lager." That's either a big claim or a prestigious honor, you can never really tell with these Eastern European beers. If they really did win the 2008 World's Best Lager competition it must not have come with an prize money because this beer looks rather low budget... I know, packaging isn't everything but when this is just one of thirty beers on the shelf in front of you, package means a lot. But enough about the label. Is this beer really "World's Best Lager" caliber?