Budget Beer Review #2 - Störtebeker: Scotch Ale

The Brewery

Störtebeker Braumanufaktur is the sole brewery in the German city of Stralsund, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The brewery was founded in 1827, although it was operating under the name "Stralsunder Brauerei" up until 2011. The company still makes beers using the Stralsunder name, such as "Stralsunder Pils", though their most popular^[1] beers all seem to conform to the Störtebeker brand and marketing.

It would appear that the name "Störtebeker" comes from the famous fourteenth century pirate, Klaus Störtebeker, of the privateer group The Victual Brothers. Unfortunately, this is never mentioned anywhere. I know that the bottle has an old-timey ship on it, but Stralsund was a Hanseatic town, which was thus part of the Hanseatic League^[2]. The ship is also described as a "Replica of a Hanseatic caravel" on the Störtebeker website.

Störtebeker can lay claim to being one of the first breweries to install refrigeration technology, improving the preservation and quality of the beer in 1899. Even though the brewery was unscathed by allied bombing during WWII, the disassembly of the facilities for reparations payments, ageing technologies and having to brew under the conditions of a socialist planned economy caused a dramatic decrease in the quality of the beer.

After German reunification, the brewery was purchased by "Nordmann Unternehmensgruppe", a company whose name rolls off the tongue, and the brewery returned to make beer according to their old Hanseatic recipes.

To date I've tried eight of their beers for an overall average score of 3.56, and they have all been perfectly drinkable, if not a little boring^[3]. Better than the average German macrobrew, but not by much.

First impressions

The colour is a deep gold, and the head retention was a bit weak. The first smell of the beer immediately hit me with booze. I mean, I know it's 9% abv, but some high alcohol beers try to hide it. I gingerly took another, gentler, sniff, but I was prepared this time. Once you get past the booze, it actually smells a bit like a whisky barrel, but one that currently holds treacle, and one of the all-time greatest hangovers imaginable. To be clear, this beer does not smell cheap, but just very alcoholic and sweet.

I had a quick read of the marketing description of the beer and was pleasantly surprised to read that it is brewed using peat smoked British whisky malt, but has spent absolutely no time in an oak barrel^[4]. I'm fine with big alcohol beers, but they need a flavour profile that disguises the high alcohol content. 

The Tasting

The first taste is sweetness, and the malt flavour is everything. But then, just as quickly as it arrived, the sweet malt flavour is replaced by an ungodly, booze hit that had all the subtlety of a volcano that's throwing red hot sledgehammers at my brainstem^[5]. I made a "pffftsch-kkk" sound from how boozy this thing tastes, which is unlike me as I'm someone who drinks my whisky neat.

After the booze dies down, the sweetness returns, and it's a bit more subdued at the finish. There's even a hint of vanilla.  It's only now that I realise that I've had one of my eyes shut for the last thirty seconds.

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind though that this was going to be a tough beer to finish. However, I refused to be beaten by this beer. So I grabbed a glass of water, moved all of the furniture with dangerous edges into another room, and sat back down with my new friend.

At no point did I get used to the alcohol in this beer. However, I was starting to expect it. Towards the end of this beer, roughly around the time I started talking to myself in the third person, I was even starting to enjoy it^[6]. However, as the beer got a little warmer^[7], the sweetness was less noticeable, and it was all booze.

I check my tasting notes that I've been writing. I've written the word "sweet" five times, "vanilla" once and "regret" (in all capital letters). Again though, let me stress that this beer does not taste bad, or cheap, or offensive. It's just that the flavour is very confronting. Confronting like the bitterness of grapefruit the first time you try it, or when people ask you where you "see yourself in five years"^[8]. 

At this point, I like to turn to the tasting notes from the brewery, and see if we agree on anything. This particular brewery has a sommelier that works for them, organising tastings and brewery tours^[9]. I got a couple of the tasting notes right: sweet and malty. I missed any trace of peat smoke though. My favourite part was her suggestions of pairings with this beer: smoked almonds, a roaring fire and a wild boar salami^[10].

Final Thoughts

I've noticed a distressing trend for the highest rated beers on Untappd to always be heavy beers, usually greater than 8% abv. The fact that this beer is 9%, and yet only has a global rating of 2.87 is something of a warning here. But I also think that global ratings can be absolutely misleading, so maybe don't read too much into that. Just a thought.

Honestly, I don't dislike this beer, but I also don't want to drink it again under any circumstances. This is a clean decent beer that happens to be a style I'm not overly fond of, and certainly hasn't won me over to. Who could I recommend this to? Well, it is a good entry level beer for those looking to try beers in the style of wee heavies, or barley wines in terms of abv^[11]. At 2.10€, it's pretty cheap too, so there's no real financial risk in trying it.

So I guess, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone, but I'm not going to encourage anyone to avoid it either.  My major criticism is that it's a one-trick pony. It uses sweetness to overcome the alcohol punch, and it doesn't fully work^[12].

Just know what you're getting yourself in for.

Brewery	Störtebeker Braumanufaktur
Beer	Scotch-Ale / Whisky-Bier
Style	Scotch Ale / Wee Heavy
Alcohol	9%
IBU	20
Price	2.10€
Untappd Global Score	2.87
My Untappd Score	3

[1] Popular as defined by Untappd is just the number of check-ins that a beer has had. The higher the numbered of check-ins, the more "popular" a beer is.
[2] The Hanseatic league was a confederation of Guilds and towns from Northern and Central Europe that came to dominate Baltic Naval trade from the late 1100s to the mid 1400s. While never being a true state or a confederation of city states, it still went to war with Denmark, and defeated them in 1368 (with some help from the Confederation of Cologne)!
[3] This is sort of the beauty and the curse of German beer. They're very rarely bad beers (unless they come in a plastic bottle), but they're also very rarely great beers either. It makes ordering a beer at restaurant a very safe, but underwhelming event.
[4] There is a barrel aged version of this beer though. It's somehow stronger at 10% abv, and I can only imagine drinks like a red-hot fire poker to the brain.
[5] Sorry, I've been playing a lot of Super Mario World recently, and those hammer-throwing, platform swinging bastards kill me every. Single. Time.
[6] You know, in the same way you enjoy a comically painful hot sauce. Sure, you enjoy the thrill ride of consuming it, but you know it's going to hurt the next day.
[7] It got a little warm because they sell this unrefined rocket fuel in half-litre bottles, and it's not a beer that one can drink at pace.
[8] Apparently the correct answer is "I don't know Dad, maybe writing a blog to legitimise my drinking".
[9]  I'm sure that Silke van Ackeren is a great sommelier, and I am not disparaging her work here. What I did find funny was that her biography on the website is only two sentences long, and they wasted an entire sentence saying "Born as a brewer's daughter she visits a lot of breweries around the world and knows interesting facts about beer". That's like saying that Einstein "was able to count pretty high" and had a "decent moustache".
[10] Unfortunately I didn't have any smoked almonds, or a roaring fire. However, I won't be caught dead in public without at least two wild boar salamis.
[11] 9% isn't that high for a barley wine or wee heavy. Googling the style yields a lot of beers with approximately 10-14% abv, with my personal most extreme example being a 20.2% abv syrup pretending to be a beer.
[12] Like Tori Spelling as an actor, post-90210.