#375: Leikeim? I Hardly Know 'em!

 I don't know what a landbier is. In fact, a landbier might be nothing at all. A quick click around Google tells us it's simply - predictably - land beer or beer of the land or country beer. Essentially, a marketing name for any beer from a (presumably rural) German brewer that doesn't fit neatly into an established category of its own. As vague as that may be, I'm happy to roll with it. 

Leikeim Landbier tastes every bit a lager, more of a helles than a pils and with a lovely fullsome grain to it. It's not particularly hoppy but it is well balanced, with just a pale suggestion of grass. At 5.4% it's a bit chewy, dare I say even flabby, its full strength not quite delivering much value. A perfectly nice lager then, but the most distinctive thing about this is its landbier 'designation'. 

We're on much firmer ground with Leikeim Pils. This one is a more standard 4.9% and pours a wonderfully crystal pale straw. It's enticingly fresh and grassy, perhaps not as much as Jever (my personal benchmark for a German pils) but after the relative non-event of the Landbier its nice to have more assertive nobles on show. Leikeim are a Franconian outfit and there's something distinctly Franconian to be found in the malt profile here - not the clean grain nothings of the nordsee, nor the pillowy marshmallow of Bohemia, but just as in its geography it is closer to the latter than the former. This gently sweet biscuit wouldn't be out of place in a Helles but it's certainly lighter, paler and cleaner than most of its Bavarian cousins. Malt is fun! The beer is fun too, a perfectly pleasant pils, if not the bitter noble skunk of my heart's desire.

We round out the trio with the Steinbier, a word that exists in my mind mainly as a segment in an episode of Michael Jackson's Beer Hunter TV series. I watched those six episodes to death in the very earliest days of my beer obsession, fascinated by the styles and traditions described but more infatuated with this glimpse of a world, a culture that was (at my time of viewing) already old and changed immeasurably.

Tasting a beer like a Steinbier is exciting for the same reason - here is a living relic, a thing that is done not because it is easy or convenient but because this is how it's done, we like it this way. To my mind, the hot stones added to the mash of a steinbier are supposed to caramelise some malt sugars and impart some wisp of smoke. There's not much of either going on in this one. OK, it is sweet, but not excessively or unusually so. Its mildly raisiny malt and toffeeish stuff is about is distinct as it gets. Like the Landbier, this one doesn't achieve great value for its ABV either, in this case 5.8%. The body is about right, being 'medium' or so, but you'll have had fuller bodies in weaker helles'.

Maybe I'm nitpicking - and missing the point - but this modern drinker was hoping for more novelty from this novel tradition. 

A decent set, but the pils is clearly going to be my pick if I'm ever back among the Leikeims.