Long time no post…

So yesterday I went to Hay Merchant (a really nice bar/bierhaus in Montrose). There is another story when Harry and I went there for a tapping of an unfiltered Pilsner Urquell (so good!), but that later. There I tried 2 types of beers I never had before. These were the Berliner weisse and the Grut Bier.

First on the Berliner weisse pictured above. (As standard had to be drunk with a pretzel) The Berliner Weisse is a wheat beer (hence the weisse) but is fermented with lactobacillus culture as well as yeast, which gives it a…. very unique taste. I say that because honestly it was way too sour to be good. I will say this though… It had a very good taste (just like any wheat beer in my opinion), if only it was not that sour…

So what about the second “Snifter”?

The second was a Grut Bier, another very “unique” beer. Grut (or Gruit) is an old-fashioned herb mixture for flavoring and bittering beer, it was even used before hops. Different grut contain different herbs but most common are sweet gale, mugwort, yarrow and some others.

This grut had a (as one of my friends pointed out) “muscle rub medicine” smell. I dont know if thats true, but certainly was a very “herby” smell, like the beer was brewed on a bunch of different, very odorous herbs.

The taste was pretty good though. A lot better then the Berliner, that’s for sure. Compare to a regular weiss beer, this one was more bitter, but also more flavorful. I guess there is something in this old-fashioned way of brewing beer!