Lone Star
By John & Dad on January 20, 2011 @ 7 PM (4 Comments)
You may think that Lone Star is nothing more than the Captain from the movie Spaceballs, but you’re wrong – it’s also a restaurant. And a country music band. And a forgettable 1996 movie. And a canceled TV series. Oh and it’s also a beer. That’s where we come in. It’s time for a John and Dad virtual Thursday review made possible by our friends at Skype.
Lone Star Beer is brewed by the Lone Star Brewing Company. A bit of history on them – the original brewery was built in 1884 and was the first large automated brewery in Texas. It was founded by a group of businessmen in San Antonio and some cat named Adolphus Busch (yeah that one). The brewery closed in 2000 and now houses the San Antonio Museum of Art, which you’ll find out in this review is a significant upgrade. The Lone Star brand has changed hands many times, passing from Olympia Brewing to Heileman to Stroh to Pabst. Production is currently farmed out to SABMiller in their Fort Worth, TX brewery.
For our Lone Star (beer) review we used a shaker glass and got a starting beer temperature of 42.8 F (which may have been 20 or 30 degrees too warm in hindsight). The ABV comes in at 4.65% and it’s a traditional 12 oz bottle.
For our aromas we got straw, dried grasses and some yeast. Not much there on the nose. For our initial flavor we got a light sweet and in the finish we moved to a very light sweet and added a light bitter. For the tastes we got the straw, dried grasses and yeast from the nose, and added some soapiness, light lemon and light corn. The lemon comes through in the taste a bit more as it warms up.
The finish length is mercifully short, the mouthful is watery and the tongue hit is in the middle. There’s no body lacing and on our malt to hop scale it comes in balanced – not enough of anything to move it towards one side or the other.
For our bottom line notes we got a yes to drinkable (especially if you’re dying of thirst), yes to repeatable (if your mouth isn’t already bored to death) and yes to balance (not too hard to balance out a whole lot of nothing). We got a no to harmony, memorable, wow factor and buy again.
Overall we’d rate it as barely beer-like. It closely resembles a regular American pale lager and that’s not a compliment. The good news is you don’t need water with it to cleanse your palate in between tastes, you can just rinse your mouth with the beer itself. If you weren’t focusing on it you wouldn’t know there was any taste to it at all.
We can’t say enough good things about it. It would be ideal for keg stands. It would be an excellent 5th beer of the night. The empty bottle is a perfect representation of an empty bottle. To sum it all up – it’s a good beer for people who don’t like good beer.
It’s quite obviouse these ‘dolts’ that presume to be beer experts enjoy beers that taste like wood (rotted wood), armpit sweat, oranges, lemons, etc., plastic, acid, dirt, weeds and so on. Not condemning the many good beers out there, but Lone Star is just as good ‘Rodeo cool’ as it is frosty near freezing.
I’m kind of a light weight when it comes to beer cause after ten I’m pretty much toasty. However Lone Star is the only beer that doesn’t get me hung over, bloated, and not to mention it taste great. As a fifth generation Texan these is the beer for me. Don’t care to much what anyone else thanks. Everyone is entitled to there own opinion.:-)
Lonestar is great. tastes good goes down easy great price. i drink it all the tyme. my pops likes it too. and my momma and she’s from Germany. YEE
I’ve had Lonestar before. I would classify it as fizzy yellow stuff. There really wasn’t anything interesting about it. That is not meant to be a knock on Texas brewers. Frankly there is not any real distinction between Lone Star and any other watery fizzy yellow beer brewed in other states. If you want to stay true to Texas and have an interesting beer, try the Fire Eagle American IPA or the Rodeo Clown Double IPA. Those are examples of great Texas beers.