one more saturday night

I have yet another bottle spirited onto my check-in in my fridge.  This one's a lager, so a nice laid-back kind of beer for a rainy evening I expect.  There's a stout waiting, but with any luck it will be chilly next week.  Probably not, though.  This Ostroff is a half-dark lager, made by Falkenštejn in collaboration with Hotel Ostrov in "Bohemian Switzerland".  It's a fairly standard sounding beer, not quite 5%, so a nice thing to have after an afternoon of hiking around mountains and woods.

Very slightly sweet aroma, a little bit sour in there too.  Mostly, it's lager smell.  Fluffy head, dies back pretty quickly, but keeps a little fuzzy cap over the top.  Although the beer is unfiltered the color is clear, with no cloudiness at all, and a warm coppery dark gold.  The taste hits with sour first, but a toasty graininess comes up from the depths.  It seems like there's some bittersweet in the background also, but they're fighting it out to see who gets to be noticed.  The bitter starts to gain ground after about half the glass.  Towards the end, though, the beer gains some weight and dials up the sweet.  It becomes more like a typical central European lager in flavor, with a touch of that grassiness, although the sour never goes away completely.  Not an especially demanding beer, could be very nice for an evening drink, all-day hike or not.