Steinlager:
G’day all and welcome to a week of celebration and merriment (I guess).  This week, the British Empire is celebrating 60 years on the throne of Queen Elizabeth as well as being the week marking the celebration of the Queen’s birthday in New Zealand and Australia.  So we let us take some time and visit our friends down under and their line of beers.  First, lets visit the home of Peter Jackson, Hobbits, psycho puppets, killer sheep, really bloody zombies and more sheep.   Steinlager from New Zealand Breweries is a nice embodiment of a beer genre that has been given a bad name thanks to our usual suspects here in the States.  The beer is your typical lager, pouring well and very clean with moderate carbonation and a small head that dissipates very quickly.  At a relatively average 4.8% ABV, the beer makes you curious with a nose filled with grains and malts with hints of a fruity sweetness.  The beers taste begins very sharp actually, hitting you with a semi-sweet/acidic apple flavor that blends with the malts to give this beer taste that is evolved beyond that of the rice based sweetness of a regular Budweiser.  The back-end of the taste turns more typical of a lager with a strong grain taste with a touch of hops floating around to keep things a bit sour but still interesting.  Not a bad beer, not the greatest either but still worth trying and one worth revisiting to see if the magic happens for me again.