Spaten München “Original – German Style Beer”, Ontario, Canada (Alcohol 5%) LCBO $2.25 (473ml can)

I just cannot believe this has happened again… I seriously cannot.

Yet another really solid imported (and inexpensive) German München beer is now brewed by Labatt Breweries in Ontario and hence tastes like absolute muck… and it’s sold in a bloody smaller can with 0.2% less alcohol to boot.

And at time of writing the LCBO website still states that it is brewed in Germany. FFS.

Much in the same manner as my late and much lamented Löwenbräu, something I covered in quite a bit of detail a few years back, I’m going to strongly suggest that you never buy this utter travesty again in its current form. Yes, I’m saying that beer drinkers should wholly boycott Spaten.

Now I’m not in any way professing that Spaten was a “Five Apple” beer, but it is one that I used to happily consume in enormous quantities in the back yard or up at the cottage, and upon many occasions over the years it became (along with the Turkish Tuborg Gold) a more than worthy understudy for my much missed Löwenbräu.

Much like Löwenbräu, and indeed most München beer, Spaten had that slightly malty edge, that being from Scotland, where historically beers have relied upon malt for much of their flavour profile, I tend to crave in an everyday beer. Today’s sorry abomination shares very little in common with its imported counterpart, but I think it’s the malt component that I find most lacking.

It has to be said that I am in no way condemning every simulacrum beer, case in point being the aforementioned Tuborg Gold, but this transplanted recipe is not so much lost in translation but lost at sea, missing, presumed dead. It honestly tastes as if someone took the liquid byproduct of someone suffering with a severe metabolic disorder and ran it through a SodaStream.

Perhaps this insipid profile is what inumerable focus groups told Labatt the Canadian palate yearns for, but no, it’s certainly not for me. No thank you.

Run this can-full-o-dregs out of town today by refusing to go anywhere near it.

Zero apples out of a possible five.

Minus two apples out of a possible five for being so bloody underhanded about it.


Jamie Drummond

Edinburgh-born/Toronto-based Sommelier, consultant, writer, judge, and educator Jamie Drummond is the Director of Programs/Editor of Good Food Revolution… And no… just no.