Brewery: Brauerei Beck & Co., St. Louis, Missouri
Beer: Beck’s Sapphire
Serving: 12 oz bottle
Glassware: Pilsner glass
Information: 6.0% ABV
Style: German Pilsner
Availability: Year-round
Cellaring: Not recommended for extended aging.
Pairings: N/A
Appearance
Bright golden in color, this clear beer shines with pride and is topped with a towering white head of foam. As the loose bubbles slowly collapsed, light wispy lace was left adorning the glass.
Smell
If there were such a style as German Adjunct Lager, the aroma of this beer would make it a prime candidate for it’s categorization. Grainy pale malt and additives smell cheap and hops seem underwhelming for the advertising push of their existence.
Taste
From the light smattering of sweet pilsner malts to the abundance of grainy pale malt and adjuncts to the creamed corn finish, Beck’s Sapphire tastes cheap. German hops are afoot though, coming in on the back end with some herbal characteristics, which greatly helps alleviate the cheapness of the malt flavor.
Mouthfeel
Sapphire’s best quality is the fact it strays from going all out effervescent with explosive carbonation like a lot of mainstream lagers. Instead, Beck’s Sapphire has a nice smooth (albeit slick) entry into a faintly dry finish with a suggestion of lingering hop bitterness captured on the back end.
Overall
Beck’s Sapphire manages to bring fourth some hop flavor and presence in an otherwise ordinary “import” lager but it doesn’t save it from being mundane, like it’s awful commercial. This “German adjunct lager” isn’t worth any elevated cost above the American swill we’ve already got here. Probably because it’s also not made in Germany. It’s made in St. Louis by you-know-who.
Score: 58 / 100 - Poor
Cheers,
-Andy
Sometimes it pays to be cynical. Thinking Beck’s in the U.S. was imported and true German beer I saw the new Sapphire and decided to give it a try. I wish I’d been more cynical and came here for information first. This is an outright disappointment. Why? Well, it isn’t German beer first, and I’m not really talking about where it originates either. No, it tastes like a lower carbonation even sweeter and slightly stronger Miller High-Life.
Without any research I feel I’m getting it. A-B, Inc. now licenses Becks for the U.S. (heck, maybe they own the brand worldwide for all I know). They are trying to parlay the move by a strong contingent of the masses into what resembles both craft and import beers. You know like the recently introduced Budweiser Black Label which this beer here seems to share 90% of the same DNA (different hop profile however). A-B, Inc. won’t fool me again. You make me appreciate Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada more than ever.
The only time I deviate from my overall motto of positivity is in regards to the big dogs. I give ‘em a fair shake because everyone deserve that (after all, it’s an art form to be able to brew on a scale that large and make every batch identical) but my experience tells me being cynical with them tends to help a little.
Additionally, I think Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada make fantastic beer. It’s not fair to punish them (like most beer geeks do) for growing large because of a high-quality product as long as that product remains high-quality.