One of the problems I find with my preferences is that it is simply too damn hot for me to be drinking the type of beer that I normally go for. When it’s 110 degrees outside, the last thing I want to drink is milk. I hate the stuff. The way it coats your mouth, the full feeling, probably sourced from a few dozen Holsteins… On a hot day it’s a bad choice and let’s be real—I get a lot of hot days. A close second is an IPA but given my purchasing habits no longer revolve around what I want to drink and what serves a sufficient writing prompt, I have to choke that down from time to time. But imperial stout? I could but it’s just not refreshing, and quite frankly I am drinking copious amounts of beer because I am thirsty.

This is my review of Colbitz Heide-Braurer Schwartzbier.  Cue the Space Balls-related puns.

This beer reminds me of a friend of mine who got into Black Lager about ten years ago during college. We would take advantage of the $0.50 wings Tuesdays on Buffalo Wild Wings and get a bunch of wings. Until that one day it occurred to me I got a free T-Shirt if I did the Blazing Wing challenge. The challenge was only to eat 24 within their time constraint of an hour. Later they made it more difficult where you had to eat fewer of them, but had to do it in a few minutes.

So…um…would ya?

So I did it, and had a Sam Adams Black Lager or two along with it.

Word to the wise–do not do this to yourself. You might think it’s a good idea to eat 24 ghost pepper wings, with the capsicum burning your lips the entire time. The pH balance in your stomach altering ever so slightly that you feel like your insides are digesting themselves. The mild acid reflux, the stench of fried chili grease oozing from your pores. Then there’s the morning after…. I was in ROTC at the time and had PT at 0600 the morning after. They accepted my stupidity as an excuse for missing it, because they were laughing too hard to stay serious enough to admonish me at the time.

By the way, I didn’t get a free t-shirt.

Eventually we made it a weekly thing. I didn’t do the challenge again, because as it turns out I am not that much a glutton for punishment, but the Black Lager thing continued.

What is Schwartzbier anyways? You may not know it, but it is apparently one of the oldest styles around.

Schwarzbier, literally “black beer,” is probably the longest continuously brewed beer style in the world, with its known ancestors close to three millennia in age and with definitive origins in the modern brewing cradle.

Today’s schwarzbier combines Old World rusticity with the graceful smoothness of lagerbier, and a clean roasted edge with German malt complexity. It’s deep, ruby-black color and modest strength makes schwarzbier the lager equivalent of basic stout.

The origin of schwarzbier lies in what perhaps the most significant historical brewing region in the world: southeastern Germany, including some of Bavaria, and portions of the former Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. The most famous, and arguably the most important, development from there was the invention of pilsner beer less than 200 years ago in Plzen, Bohemia. But the true gems from the region are the ancient, but modernly polished styles: schwarzbier and the smoky rauchbier.

There is concrete evidence that crude schwarzbier was being brewed there as long ago as the ninth century B.C. (and undoubtedly, well before). This proof comes from an 1935 archaeological discovery seven miles west of Kulmbach in Northern Bavaria. The venture unearthed an Iron Age Celtic tomb that dated to about 800 B.C. That grave held an amphora with some residual brewing material and the charred crumbs of partially baked wheat bread, known to be the raw material for Celtic and Germanic brews of the time. Since this discovery places the oldest evidence of brewing in Central Europe in Kulmbach, and that beer was black, we can deduce that the world’s oldest, and still-produced, style of beer was schwarzbier.

The result is something that has the dark roasted complexity of a stout (minus the lactose) combined with the refreshing nature of lager.

Serve it cold, in tall mugs with a group of friends. This one in particular was actually pretty inexpensive for a six pack of pint cans and like all German beer is made in compliance with the Reinheitsgebot, assuming that means anything to you at all. Colbitz Heide-Braurer Schwartzbier 3.5/5