In 5: Light, Black, Smokey, Rich, Not like Guinness with a Rennie in

First garlic… bread, then cheese… cake and now black… lager, seriously.

Sounding a little bit more like the setting of a baddy lair in a Bond Movie than a beer we really couldn’t resist picking one of these up when we saw it. A wonderful concept and a frankly bizarre label quickly draws your attention to this funky little beer sitting on the shelf waiting to be plucked. A little research tells us Zeitgeist has been around since early 2009 but this is the first we’ve seen of it. Although we’re still new to this beer thing I’m not sure that counts as a roaring success. But we didn’t let that put us off – we hadn’t heard of half the beers we’ve tried so far before we started to really look.

So what’s black lager all about? It’s not like the mildy irritating pop band Blue, who aren’t blue, or the lesbian fantasy Pink, who clearly isn’t pink; it’s proper black, like the night. In fact, it’s darker than the night, it’s like the night in the middle of the desert and someone turned off the moon and the stars.

We thought that lager was supposed to be yellow and sold in packs of 4 cans with little plastic bird/fish/fluffy animal catchers holding them together? Well apparently this hasn’t always been the case and lager was originally a black coloured drink, or so the BrewDogs tell us on their cryptic, creepy Zeitgeist website.

OK, so we’ve established it’s a little bit ‘Salad Fingers’ on the outside, and that it’s black on purpose but what’s it like on the inside?

Well it’s surprisingly refreshing and light considering it looks like someone has dropped a Rennie in your pint of Guinness. The rest of the experience is kind of how you might expect a black lager to be, smokey, chocolatey, rich, malty and a little bit treacly. Somehow, it works. It’s the lightness that really surprised us and we almost feel like you need to try this in a blind taste test to fully appreciate it. Either a blind test or drunk in a seedy nightclub, but not the kind of place you might find a Batemans Hooker. Naughty.

If you like it, tell them at the little Zeitgeist blogaroo they set up to let the drinkers guide the brand direction – quite a nice idea if you’re a nerd like we blatantly are http://www.zeitgeistbeer.com/blog or better still, tell us via the comments below or on some other manner of Social Media on which partake. Eyes right. ->

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