Weissbier Clean-out

I was clean-out-the-cellar-time a while back, as I'd amassed a bit of a backlog and ended up sorting the beer shelves roughly by best before date (grouped by month, I'm not that sad) so I wouldn't have too many missed beers. Amongst the forgotten were some weissbiers I'd picked up early in the summer. Time to give them a good home.

Augustiner Weissbier, a lovely, almost glowing, cloudy, orange-hued pale amber with a trademark weissbier fluffy pillow head. Heavy on the cloves, with a nutmeg warmth and just-ripe bananas. So far, so textbook. The initial taste is surprisingly clovey, in a clove-drop way, with more than a twist of lime. I'm not sure if this slight sour edge is because the bottle was a few weeks past the best before date, but although a little thin, this is a pleasing enough, refreshing weissbier.

According to the label, the other, Oscar Maxxum Weizen, was one brewed by Privatbrauerei Iserlohn for the chain of drink stores I buy most of my beer from; Trinkgut. At least that's what the small-print says. With a nice spicy aroma, it has a good dose of classic cloves and ample bubblegum. It has toffee undertones, soft cloves and, yes, there's banana back there, but as the aroma suggests, the main flavours are clovey-bubblegum ones, with an added lime-like palate cleanser. Actually quite decent to begin with, but not very much to the finish. Still, for a store-branded, fairly cheap beer it does the job well enough.