Brew Review: Tiger Beer
- Russell W. Tan
- Oct 24, 2015
- 3 min read
So Singapore celebrated its 50th birthday this year - a good cause for celebration given all that we've managed to achieve.
My dad and I stumbled upon a good deal on Tiger beer, $2.20 per can, so we went to get a carton.
The can design differed from the plain old Tiger can design because our own home-grown brewery, Asia-Pacific Breweries (APB) is in on the whole SG50 celebrations thing as well.
For one, I very much prefer this can over the standard blue Tiger can. The livery just screams Singapore; and it looks brighter and less drab than the dark blue/silver can.
Isn't that much better than the ordinary can?
It says that the beer has won gold championships in Geneva and Paris. I wonder who gave them the medals? As always, as with wine, be careful about buying a drink just because it's won medals.
Out of the can, the beer pours a very large foamy head with microbubbles that refuses to die down. The staying power is there, different than other euro lagers that I've tried so far.
Even after a few swigs, the head still stays - it thins down to about half an inch.
Carbonation is heavy at first but really doesn't stay in the beer for long. The carbonation dies down quickly to give a very flat beer.
This beer is not a good beer to drink. It is flat, weak, and smells weird. Out of the can, (and the nose does persist even in the weizen glass), the nose is strong and fierce; it smells of green vegetal hops (like freshly cut grass; I don't like it) with a little malt, and a hint of a metallic scent just around the corner of the nose like an olfactory halo.
The lager is weak, with no appreciable finish at all. The bark is stronger than the bite. In the mouth, it tastes like watered-down Mariestads with a featherweight hint of biscuit, but without any of its redeeming qualities. It is very lightly hopped and I think the hop quality must be really bad for the beer to taste this vegetal, green and grassy. The water that is used to make this beer is very, very mineral as well. In a beer, that's a bad thing.
A little yeast and residual sugar is apparent in the beer but it is not well integrated. The components are all very separate from each other and very one-dimensional. There is no complexity present in this beer at all.
The alcohol is not well hidden and goes down a bit warm on the throat.
This is, true to its name, a pale lager. It is very pale indeed. In fact, it pales in comparison to all the other beers that I've had so far. However, it is a good introductory beer for someone who has never tried beer before; not because it's easy to drink, but because it's very similar to plain water, which is what most of us are comfortable with drinking (ever seen someone live without water?).
Also true to it's label, the taste of this beer is just not there. It tastes like a living, breathing tiger with no opposable thumbs tried to brew beer, and canned the outcome as Tiger beer.
Component Intensities:
Malt: 2/10
Yeast: 2/10
Hops: 3/10
Overall Ratings:
Nose: 2/10
Body: 3/10
Finish: 2/10
Total: 7/30
Conclusion: I do not like this beer. I would have gladly returned the entire carton of beer in exchange for just three pints of Paulaner Hefeweizen.
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