CulturAle Press

Welcoming sign at Pub 27 in Pompeii

Burial Bloodtusk Keller Lager, Burial, Asheville, NC from Half Time, Poughkeepsie

Date:  October 20, 2018

The Story— Asheville, North Carolina has become the Portland, Oregon, of the East Coast.   Big national breweries like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium have moved in, but the number of smaller independent breweries remain legion.

Burial has a remarkable reputation among beer connoisseurs in the South.  We’ve found their beers variable — hits and misses, but the hits have often been out of the park.

Keller beers trace origins to Germany where breweries aged beers in “kellers” cellars carved into hillsides that provided natural refrigeration through summer months.  At their best, a soft tasty slightly fruity yeast brings hops and yeast together in a beautifully balanced sessionable lager. Not all yeasts are tasty enough to feature in an unfiltered beer even if they create good drinkable beers, and that’s especially true with lager yeasts.

We’re tough on Keller Lagers; we produced a double win at the Great American Beer Festival with our Keller Pilsner, and not many keller beers approach what Old Dominion and St. George did for us.   But this one brought an ovation from Ellie and a standing-O from me.

A word on the source– as we’ve mentioned here before, Half Time Poughkeepsie is one of our go-to great beer stores in our thrice yearly great beer trek from Boston to our home in Maryland.  This fall we skipped the others and just went to Half Time and found over a hundred beers we haven’t seen before (and boy do we look!).   If we bought sours indiscriminately, which we gave up last year, the haul would have been even greater.  It’s worth checking expiration dates, but Half Time does better than most mega-beer stores in keeping fresh beers on their shelves.

The Beer— Soft flavors attest to a skillful keller approach.   Softly chalky and softly sweet and softly fruity with a you guessed it, soft bitter at the end. Some soft sucrose and berry fruit along the way. Maybe pretty hoppy for the style in a traditional sense, but so was our Keller Pils.   Ellie noted that the yeast was modest and retiring and tasty– and that’s just what a keller beer yeast is supposed to be.

Value — Very good to excellent. We’re sorry we didn’t come home with a case of it.

This week we return to the US to highlight some great American craft beers, some of which we’ve found in researching out first US Beer publication: Brews and Snooze-– Breweries you can visit and walk back to a fine place to spend the night.  Look for it in 2019.

Next week we stay in the US with a full week of Guinness beers — a few from Dublin, but most from “Guinness Open Gate Brewery” in Halethorp, near Baltimore, Maryland.  We’ll talk more about the venue in our main post and highlight seven exceptional beers– most from the Baltimore Brewery, but a couple of can’t miss beers from Ireland you can only get here.

About these posts:  We taste and evaluate over a thousand beers every year.  The beers posted here rank in the top quarter of those tastings.   Values:  “fair” is a good beer at an above market price, “good” is worth the money, “very good” is a bargain, and “excellent” is a steal.