Can a good thing be improved upon?

Freigeist AbraxXxas Pear Lichtenhainer

Let me say first that I love the original version of this beer, even if it's not the Abraxas that everyone gets themselves so worked up about. This one has more 'x's. And a picture of Herman Hesse smoking a cigar on the label. Anyway, it seems there are in fact several versions of this, including a peated (!!!) version, and maybe an apple one as well. The first one I ever had struck me as extra smoky, but it was following (or preceding?) some distilled Schlenkerla at Pizza Paradiso, so who knows. But it was great.

Anyway, smelling the thing, it smells great. Like the original. What the hell is a 'Lichtenhainer,' anyway? I think we're going with 'Smoked Berliner Weiße'. Seems related to gose, grozidskie, and/or grätzer. Probably kind of an old style, a lacto sour (but not too sour) made with smoked malts. Because dear readers, once upon a time, all beer was sour, and all beer was made with smoked malt. What a time it must have been to be alive.

I love the labels on these, by the way. It's a shame I've never really gotten a chance to see them side by side in person, because they're different primary colors, and cool hand-lettered titles. But Shelton Bros doesn't seem to push the rest of the line very hard, and it's a smallish experimental arm of a German brewery, so presence in this market is going to be limited to begin with.

So the pear only really appears at the beginning of your sip. It feels like juice, and tastes a little bit like juice. I wish I had an original to do a side-by-side, but I deliberately left one bottle of the original at Beer Mongers when I last bought it (months ago), as I explained to the proprietor, for someone else to discover it. He seemed amused and pleased by this (he was also a big fan of the beer of course, which was why it was in the shop).

So yeah, mostly just the original Abraxxxas (a vaguely smoky gose-type beer) with a little bit of pear thrown in. Subtle, and interesting, the way an experimental beer oughtta be. Unfortunately, it was also quite expensive, so this is the only one I'm going to buy.