Tsingtao

Brewed by Tsingtao Brewery
Style: Premium Lager
Qinqdao, China

Serve in Lager glass

330ml green bottle from Safeway. Poured a clear amber nicely carbonated with white qd head. Fruity rice aroma with hops note. Nicely balanced crisp light lager flavour. No chemical or metallic flavours& no skunk despite the green bottle. Very long bitter finish. Nice& refreshing.

Bottle. Light honey body with no head. Nose-sweet adjuncty skunk. Taste-mildly sweet, not a big adjunct taste, no skunk. This beer is not surprising in what it has, it is surprising in what it is missing-no burnt plastic, corn, rice, skunk, or bitter taste. Very mild with just the right amount of sweetness. SURPRISINGLY good!

UPDATED: JUL 3, 2006 355 mL bottle: Why are people being so hard on this pale lager? OK, it is not so much "premium" as "light." It is sweet and goes down smoothly, some good qualities in a lager. Not much hops or bitterness, easy-drinking for sure. To complain this lacks body is to miss the point of what this lager is trying to be, so just take it for what it is. Watery, sort of, but refreshing. Compared to choking back some of our macro import canned lagers, this is very smooth.

I must say, I wasn’t expecting much when I ordered this one at a restaurant in Boston’s ChinaTown..But..It’s surprisingly good! Who would have thought the Chinese brewed good beer..go figure. It makes more sense now, upon learning that Tsingtao was a German possession in the 1900’s. The beer itself is refreshing and bizarrely light-tasting for a regular beer, but in an inoffensive sort of way. Decent brew all around. (AB owns 20-ish% of the company)

While on vacation in China I had this beer with meals several times, in the large bottle format. In the United States, an average to below-average beer, but in China, which I have based my rating on, it was quite good and rich. The beer had a full gold color and a moderate white head, with fizzy carbonation. The aroma was hop-controlled and predominantly floral and herbal. An almost-medium-bodied beer with a good, bitter flavor. Definitely a beer that I would look forward to trying again if in China.

Pours a golden yellow with a sweet, corny aroma. It tastes of sweet, corny malt and slightly bitter hops with an overall sweet characteristics. This isn’t my favourite, but it’s a good beer nonetheless.

If you like German pilsner’s, this isn’t a bad try. To me it tasted exactly like Warsteiner. Not as bad as I expected and definitely drinkable, it’s just sort of weird that most of the Asian countries have adopted German pilsners as their representative beers.

Probably the best option for a lager, when one goes to the local Chinese restaurant. Pale in colour and quite ricey - I wouldn’t drink this in the pub as is by no means a session beer; however, tastes good when one is tucking into a spicy Szechuan labrador and a sweet and sour viper! As the late Bruce Forsyth was wont of saying: "The rice is right!"