Sadly, this marks the final Freigeist brew for me to review. For the moment, anyway. This last bier is one of the more experimental brews from Freigeist. It isn't a traditional bier dragged from obscurity into the 21st century nor is it a familiar bier tweaked a little bit. Pimock ("outsider") is labeled as a Rhineland Weizen. What is a Rhineland Weizen?
Freigeist may have invented a new style here. It takes the familiar Bavarian hefeweizen and turns it on its head by infusing it with the spirit of Cologne. (Cologne being the brewery's home town and in the Rhineland.) Instead of the normal yeast which imparts the characteristic banana and clove flavors, Freigeist uses Kölsch yeast to impart a whole new taste. The bier also has more hops than a normal weizen.
Pimock pours a lovely amber color – a bit darker than the typical hefeweizen. Like its Bavarian cousin, this bier is cloudy with all that yeast still floating about. My glass had a nice tan head of about ½ inch which stuck around and made for a pretty sight. There wasn't much in the way of bubbles going up, though.
It is said that the most important sex organ is the brain. Likewise the most important olfactory and gustatory organ must also be our gray matter. One's experience with a beer depends on many factors. Are you drinking in a social setting? Or are you alone? What mood are you in? What do you have a taste for at that moment? For example, Miller High Life is not my cup of tea yet it can taste really good when offered to me after I've been working outside on a hot day.
I mention this because I had one of those psych-out moments with Pimock. I put my glass to my nose and inhaled a nice malty smell that was like bread as well as corn. The aroma had a fruity sweetness to it which at first was like apricot to my nose. Then I began to think about how this is a Rhineland weizen so there won't be any of those banana/clove phenols. And just at that moment I started to smell banana. My brain just couldn't help itself. I don't care if you've achieved Elder God Cicerone status – your brain will play tricks on you. That Platonic idea of bier will always be just out of reach and we're stuck arguing about shadows on the tavern wall.
At this point my ability to smell had been compromised so I moved onto the taste. As you can imagine, there was a prominent wheat/bread taste to Pimock. Then came a fruity sweetness just as in the aroma. Thankfully my senses weren't seeing, smelling, and tasting bananas everywhere by this point. The fruity flavor here was like peach and nectarine to my tongue. There were definitely more hops here than in the typical weizen but you won't mistake Pimock for an IPx. I could taste a pleasing amount of peppery/grassy hops but there was little accompanying bitterness.
On the finish the grain flavors subsided allowing more of that hop flavor to come through. It took on a rather spicy edge here which added a good dose of dryness. On my glass was some nice Schaumhaftvermoegen with a slew of narrow streaks around it.
While the use of Kölsch yeast here is novel, it was really the hoppiness that caught my attention the most. I really enjoyed how the peppery hops contrasted with the stone fruit sweetness here. These two flavors simply went together well. Pimock has a light body and is 5.3% A.B.V. which seems in line with Bavarian weissbiers. It drinks a lot like its Bavarian counterpart except that I found Pimock to be less carbonated so it's missing that bubbly mouthfeel typical of weissbiers of the south.
Junk food pairing: Pimock will benefit from pairing with Mexican. Try some lime-chili puffed corn chips or jalapeno-tinged Cheetos.
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