Since I’ve been drinking my homebrew almost exclusively lately, I thought it was time to switch things up a bit and give a new beer a try. That just happened to be Southern Tier’s Eurotrash Pilz, which sits at 80 on Beer Advocate.

Oddly enough, the name made sense right away. The beer smells like a pilsner, but … dirty? I’m not sure if its the name or the actual smell that makes me think that. Maybe it’s just well named.There’s a very straight wheat kind of smell, almost grassy. There are no signs of hops anywhere on the nose, at least for me.

As with any pilsner, the taste was very simple. The beer was very smooth with very little carbonation and should be served nice and cold (as was mine). This beer meant to go down easy. Not much flavor going on, maybe some grape? I will, however, give Eurotrash points for being wonderfully clear, as you might expect.

The crispness of the beer certainly comes from the use of lager yeast (pilsner coming from the lager “family”) and as far as refreshing beers go, this certainly works. I was curious if I’d be possible to do this at home without the cooling process of a lager. From a homebrew perspective, I imagine some variation of a California ale yeast would be good, but the lager yeast, from what I read, is what probably offered the grape flavor I tasted and different fruit flavors others may find.

I’m not much of a pilsner fan in general so I probably won’t go out of my way to have this again. However, it’s probably among the better commercial pilsners I’ve had.