Bierstadt Lagerhaus Helles: The Inescapable Virtue of the Boring

If you lean in the shower just right, you can arc the water over your ears, down your scapula, and in between your butt cheeks in a fetal embrace. The roar of the uterine temperature water over the crown of your head is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to escape the ever grinding maw of daily rituals. And it is free.

Feeling the rush of bath water in between your asscheeks is a simple pleasure that feels private and wrong, such is the case with drinking helles. Lagers are the bookends of complete novice and complete expert in the beer world, so much that pastryphiles in the middle even feign enjoyment while pursuing the opposite. The simple helles is even looked down upon by the Pilsner segment as TOO rudimentary. Like British people obsessed with potato chips, they are eschewed by all for pushing the crisps too far.

What happens when Helles becomes so refreshing that its simplicity is its sole and inescapable virtue? You transcend beer trends and arrive the bottom fermented event horizon. @bierstadtlager has made a beer so unworthy of comment that it has created a beer that is unstable. In liquid form it sublimates and is gone instantly. The “mad croosh” index can only be expressed in scientific notation. It’s sole good is that it is the MOST drinkable substance. The content is a chapter from an R.L. Stine book, you drill through Monster Blood and that is the experience, the sheer volume is edifying.

Can blandness itself be a virtue? That first Bumble date where she wore Tory Burch flats, talked about Urban Decay contouring, and spoke on “interstitial gardening” left you feeling nothing, but the absence of feeling is an intense feeling.

It’s just 1 part pilsner malt to 95 parts water. There’s a faint Mt Hood type of “hop” presence, an ethereal IBU that’s really just chaperoning a pile of water crackers at a Latter Day Saint malt field trip. Nothing is happening, and it is beautiful. If we deride men for gathering in landlocked backyards and predicating their self worth on thimble pours of rare stouts, let us extol those who silently drink liters of a style no one cares about. The true Hallertauer heroes.

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