The same brewery that gave the world Bamberg’s beautiful, bonfire-in-a-glass Rauchbier also makes a Helles. Which feels, on paper, like Iggy Pop releasing a soft-rock ballad — but the trick is that the bonfire never quite leaves the building.
Schlenkerla’s Helles is brewed in the same vaulted rooms, with the same equipment, by the same Trum-family hands that have been doing this since 1405. The malt isn’t smoked the way the Märzen’s is. But it’s malted upstairs, in a building where smoked malt has been malted for six centuries. The hops are Bavarian, from around Nürnberg, and the beer is lagered in century-old caves under the brewery floor. The smoke that finds its way into the bottle is more rumour than statement — a ghost in the architecture rather than a knock on the door.
What you get in the glass: a clean, pale gold Helles at 4.3% ABV, the kind you could drink three of and still want a fourth, with a faint exhalation of campfire at the back of the throat. The first sip is honest Bavarian Helles — bread crust, light hay, gentle bitterness. The second sip is where the alder-smoke phantom shows up, very politely, like a guest who knows the rules. Untappd drinkers seem to agree it’s the most accessible thing the brewery makes — subtle, sessionable, “smoky but not punching you” is the consensus. A few diehards complain it’s not smoky enough, which is rather the point.
There’s a small piece of philosophy in this beer. Schlenkerla didn’t have to make a Helles. They could’ve leaned into the smokebeer brand and called it a day. Instead they made the most quietly subversive thing imaginable: a “normal” beer brewed in an abnormal place, that proves the place itself does the work.
If you ever find yourself in Bamberg, sitting under a low wooden beam at the Schlenkerla tavern with the door open onto Dominikanerstraße and the bells of the cathedral counting the hour, order the Helles first. Then the Märzen. The order matters.
3.49 / 5 • ABV: 4.3% • My take: the most undersold beer Schlenkerla makes.