Fritzy: another gem in Schilling BeerCo's High-quality Lineup

Fritzy is a Rotbier, or Franconian-style Red Lager, from Schilling Beer Company of Littleton, New Hampshire.  It comes in at 5.1% alcohol by volume.

Franconian Rotbier is not a style one sees very often.  It resembles a Munich Dunkel or a Vienna Lager, but has more body, more toast, and less sweetness than those beers. Fritzy has a typical red-orange color, with spots of copper, is very well carbonated, and has very subtle bitterness on the back-palate.

Achieving such precise balance between body, bitterness and sweetness is a high-wire act that requires a lot of brewing skill and experience.  Fritzy starts with an “heirloom German pilsner malt” as its base, to give the beer its crisp, clean taste.  Fritzy is also disarmingly light on the palate, given its deep color.

That color comes from a blend of crystal malts - perhaps CaraMunich and CaraRed? - that gives the beer profound color so completely opposite to the often-insipid, mailed-in style that some craft brewers’ “Irish Red” may bring to mind.  These crystal malts offer a very subtle sweet restraint, in contrast to the sugar-bomb explosion of some red-brown beers.

Fritzy also eschews Melanoidin malt, which mimics the concentrating powers of decoction, in favor of actual decoction.  That’s another time and money spend that many brewers can’t - or don't want to = afford.  Decoction gives the beer all its “yum,” since it offers the complex caramel and brown flavors of the Maillard reaction at its core.  Real decoction is not synthetic; it takes time and patience.

Which brings us to the hops - Spalter and Tettnanger - which are related to each other and to the famous Saaz hop used in Czech pilsners like Urquell.  These hops are typically delicate, spicy and herbal; they also have very low alpha acid content, meaning that they are not very bitter.  In order to offer enough bitterness to balance against the decoction sugars, Schilling has most likely had to put a tremendous quantity of these hops into the brew.

It is well worth the time to deconstruct beers like Fritzy, since they are not made by many breweries. As a result, customers may not quite know how to approach it.

Drink with confidence! This is superlative beer.