Golden Pheasant

Kids, listen to your beer-buyers. I've struck up a conversational relationship with Weaver Street Market's friendly beer-buyer these last months, begun over our mutual appreciation of the Best . Beer. Evar. So today I step up to a newly-full case at the Weave, and ask him, "What's new? What's good?" There were some intriguing, more generally November-appropriate beers newly on offer (a Sam Smith's holiday ale, for one), but given that the mercury popped into the mid-70s today, the brew that caught my eye/ear was Golden Pheasant. I probably would've been familiar previously with it if my Eastern European travels had taken me through Bratislava - it's a Slovak beer - but they didn't, so I wasn't. It was described to me as a "real pilsner," and what the Czech beers were before mass production made everything go frowny-face and insipid.

Like I said - listen to your beer-buyers. Golden Pheasant is pleasing from the first drop out of the bottle, as it's above all else golden, a deep rich gold like... well, I'll just say "good beer." Without being heavy, it has a rich, malty flavor but still keeps the crisp, clean, hoppy ending of a great pilsner. Highly recommended.