Brew Review: Mariestads Export Lager
- Russell W. Tan
- Oct 15, 2015
- 2 min read
This beer can be found in IKEA at the Food Market (that's the place where you buy the famous IKEA meatballs in frozen form so you can go home and ask Maria to cook it for you). It costs $3.50 per can.
It's in a bright golden can in a matte finish. The livery is all gold and red, and it looks very garang. It immediately strikes you as higher quality than standard Tiger because of the finish on the can.
APB, take a lesson from them!
This beer pours a huge head full of macro bubbles that dissipates quickly, leaving you with a halo around the edge of the glass.
The first time I tried this lager, I tried it in a champagne flute, and I realized later that it was a huge mistake simply because of the heavy carbonation in the beer.
The head is damn big. And dies quickly. This pale lager beer... is a super beer. I always start off a beer session with Mariestad’s - maybe because it’s so friendly and light and well balanced.
The beer smells distinctly of honey, malt, citrus (mostly lemon) the first time you get to it. The beer, being a lager, is moderately to heavily hopped but it is evident the quality of the hop is not there yet.
The body is cereal, biscuity, and is very obviously grainey in taste - it tastes a little of rice. It’s quite refreshing to be able to taste the grains and the cereal in a beer for once. It makes you wanna knock back on one more can again and again and again just so you taste the grains one more time.
Either that or I’m an alcoholic. The finish is silky smooth. Goes down smooth and rounds off sweetly. There is no other way to describe the finish but round. The usual lager hoppy kick, surprisingly, is almost non-existent - it is replaced by a wash of biscuit hitting you in the palate.
See, it foamed up like crazy on another occasion as well, proving conclusively that it's not my fault!
Overall a good beer to chug down and even appreciate on a daily basis, but it's a superb ordinary beer. This should be the lowest common denominator all beer breweries should brew beer by. Refreshing and light beer that can even be had for breakfast.
Ok, and when it's appreciated in a Weizen glass, the appeal goes up 6253%.
The flavors become more nuanced and the hoppy kick is better integrated. Not that it had a lot of hoppiness to begin with, but something about the integration of the hops is wrong with the nose concentration you get from a flute. Like the hops don't integrate well with the malt and yeast.
Component Intensities:
Malt: 6/10
Yeast: 1/10
Hops: 3/10
Overall Ratings:
Nose: 6.5/10
Body: 7/10
Finish: 8/10
Total: 21.5/30
P.S.: My friend Jon bought me a dozen of these beers and I couldn't be happier. This is a very very good staple beer.
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