Posted by Greg Clow in beer, beverages on January 15, 2008 at 5:32 pm
While beers like Labatt Ice and Black Ice may be low-selling discount brands today, ice beer was red hot in 1993, with the various Ice brands holding over 10% of the Canadian beer market. Following on the quick rise and even quicker fall of such beer marketing trends as "dry" and "draft", ice beer was first brought to market by Labatt, who claimed to have developed an exclusive new brewing process where the beer is chilled to a few degrees below freezing, at which point ice crystals are removed. Since water freezes before alcohol, the remaining beer has a higher alcohol content, and an even smoother taste than other typical mainstream lagers since the freezing process also removes tannins and other bitter flavour compounds.
When Molson and the large American brewers quickly came out with the own ice beers, Labatt made a big deal about the fact that the knock-offs were merely ice filtered, and that Labatt Ice was the only one made using their proprietary freezing process. What they neglected to mention, however, was that this process wasn't as new or exclusive as they claimed, as the method of concentrating beer by freezing it had been discovered in Germany some 100 years earlier. Or so the story goes, at least.
According to legend, it was 1890 when a worker at the Reichelbräu Brewery in the city of Kulmbach left some casks of their bock beer outside overnight, not realizing that the temperature was going to drop below freezing. The next day, the brewers found that most of the beer had frozen, save for a small amount of thick brown liquid in the centre of each cask. Tasting it, they found that the flavours of the malty bock had been concentrated into a rich and sweet elixir - and a few moments later, it was obvious that the alcohol had been concentrated as well. From that day forward, Reichelbräu and other German breweries started to partially freeze a portion of each year's batch of bock and doppelbock (a stronger version of bock) to produce the strong, sweet beer that became known as eisbock (which is translated and pronounced as "ice bock").
While they weren't one of the breweries that intentionally created an eisbock, G. Schneider & Sohn of Kelheim unwittingly created a very unique one in the 1930s when shipments of their Aventinus Weizen-Doppelbock ("veye-tssen-doppel-bock", or wheat double bock) partially froze during transport. Treated as a happy accident by those who imbibed it, this was likely the world's first weizen-eisbock, but drinkers couldn't enjoy an intentional version until just a few years ago, when Schneider brewmaster Hans Peter Drexler froze a batch of Aventinus to produce the official Schneider Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock.
Those who have tried the original Aventinus will know that it's already a pretty substantial brew. With a rich ruby-brown body, full flavours of malt and spice, and 8.2% alcohol, it's like a weizen on steroids. But compared to Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock, regular Aventinus is a flabby girly-man.
Pouring a murky reddish-brown colour with a small head and a very still body, the Weizen-Eisbock looks like very few other beers. It presents an absolutely fantastic aroma with notes of dark pumpernickel bread, cherries, chicory, sweet malt, rich port, and hints of spices like cardamom and clove. The mouthfeel is smooth and soft, with little carbonation, and the flavour is not quite as complex as the aroma suggests, but it’s still a nice combination of yeasty/bready character and dark, rich fruit notes, with some alcohol warmth & dryness in the finish.
Ah, yes, the alcohol. Sitting at a monstrous 12% alcohol by volume, this beer packs a serious wallop. Which is why I was so surprised to see that the LCBO brought it in for their Winter Warmers promotion in 500 ml bottles (LCBO 58875 - $3.95/500 ml) rather than the 330 ml bottles used for the rest of the world. It also doesn't help that the purple and silver label is virtually identical to the one on regular Aventinus, making it hard to know which one you might be grabbing from the shelf. But cautious buyers and drinkers will definitely be well rewarded by this truly distinctive beer. Take that, Labatt.
