Advent Beer #8: Tannen Hell by Hohenthanner Schlossbrauerei

I didn’t start drinking until I was 24.  I was admittedly one of those snooty 21-year olds with a stick up my butt that felt that he didn’t really need to drink at all in order to have a good time in life.  Eventually there were some changes in my life, and my sister was one of the people who really told me that I needed to loosen up and simply figure out how to have fun.  And among the changes I tried to make with my life then was that I figured that I should remove the stick out of my butt about drinking and just give it a shot.

So for the next few years I was making up for a lot of lost time, and I was basically trying everything.  Pretty early on, I realized that hard shit wasn’t really for me, wine was only on special occasions, and that when the day was over, beer was probably my jam.  And one of the things I learned early on, was that Asian beers, were pretty tame in terms of ABV, flavor, and other criteria that are popularly utilized to measure a beer.

Well, Tannen Hell, in spite of being a German bier, is basically an Asian beer.  My eyebrow furrowed after I popped the can, gave it a sniff, and poured it into my glass, and it was as bright and clear as lemonade.  Immediately, I began to hypothesize that this was going to be a fairly weak flavor, and it was confirmed seconds later with the first sip.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t terrible.  According to the snobs at BeerAdvocate, it’s classified as a lager, but this is an instance where I’d wonder if there’s some sort of subclass that this could be categorized in instead, because I’ve had my share of lagers, and few of them have been as light-bodied and as tame tasting as this one was.

It almost had like a cherry, fruity note somewhere in the flavoring, but that was about as much flavor as this beer had.  As I said, it was kind of bland, very light, and in spite of the 4.9% ABV, this is one of those times where I call bullshit because it’s almost like the closest thing to a Miller Lite I feel like I’ve had from a brand outside of ‘Murica.

Don’t really have much else to say about this one, and the fact that I’m itching to wrap this up because I have some 90 Day Fiancé to catch up on says everything that really needs to be said about Tannen Hell.  It’s not the worst of the bunch, but barely.

Current Rankings:

  1. First Coral (#2)
  2. Kirta (#5)
  3. Turbo Prop (#6)
  4. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
  5. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
  6. Hell (#1)
  7. Tannen Hell (#8)
  8. Käuzle (#3)