Leinenkugel

Leinenkugel beers are fairly ubiquitous in Wisconsin, and I have got to be grateful for that, given that their Red, one of the better mainstream beers out there, is in almost every bar around here and has saved me from having to drink Miller or Bud on many an occasion. (In understocked East Coast bars, Rolling Rock is my fallback.) I just wish that Leinie's did a better job with their other brews. I have heard Dick Leinenkugel, VP of Marketing for the brewer, speak locally on a couple of occasions -- nice enough guy -- and to hear him tell it they have had more commercial hits than misses. Perhaps that is because some of their beers, aimed squarely at the female market, are not all that beerish.

I was at a Green Bay Bullfrogs baseball game this Friday night, a company outing on the Leinies Northwoods Fan Deck. (The Bullfrogs, by the way, are not a Class A team like the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers in Appleton, but are in the Northwoods League, an elite summer league for college players.) The Deck is an all-you-can-eat-and-drink proposition, so I tried all the Leinies they had (not including the Red, grumble, grumble).

The Honey Weiss I've had before, and never detected the honey; too bad, since I like a honey note in beer. This is just very weak beer. (Leinie's Berry Weiss, not on the Deck, tastes like berry soda.) I tried the Summer Shandy and Sunset Wheat for the first time; the former is a lemonade concoction with no beer profile to speak of, the latter a lame watery liquid whose wheatiness I'll have to take on faith. All in all, Leinie's has achieved success with insipid half-beers. Their Big Butt Doppelbock is passable (although there are much better bocks out there); and I've heard tell that their small-batch "Big Eddy" beers, an Imperial IPA and a Russian Imperial Stout, are exceptional (but these had little distribution even in Wisconsin; I never saw them -- the IPA does not appear to have been bottled for stores).