BEST PILSNER ON THE PLANET?

Sure, we've written a few things about MOONLIGHT BREWING the past few weeks. We'll probably keep doing so until we've tried every beer in the great man's lineup and reported to you on our findings. Latest "casualty", if you will, was the REALITY CZECK PILSNER. Now, this picture to your left is not what we drank, because what we drank has never, will never be bottled - just like all of other Moonlight beers. No, this beer is one that was bottled by a rabid partisan of Moonlight's, who gave them to friends as gifts (as Moonlight's Brian Hunt recounted in our recent email interview with him). The one I delighted in the other night was served on tap at a well-known pub in my hometown. I just knew that this was going to be the pilsner that broke open the whole style for me, a style very often spat/shat upon by the discerning beer geek, who typically loves his ales, and disdains the lagers & especially the pilsners. Hey, I was that guy, more or less. I went to what was then known as Czechoslovakia in 1990, but what I remember most beer-wise was drinking my first DUVEL, and quite a few of them at that, as well as imbibing boatloads of hearty beer in a Prague beer hall for the equivalent of 10 cents a glass. Good times!

REALITY CZECK is by quite a wide margin the highest-rated Czech pilsner on Beer Advocate, including the ones from the mother country. Not sure how fair or representative that is, but it's quite honestly one of the finest beers I've ever had. Unlike other pilsners, this didn't have that crisp, biting, lager-ish taste I'm so familiar with - instead, it was creamy, "deep" and even a little hoppy, and it was just fantastic through and through. Like an ale, kinda. Hard to pin down what it tasted like, really, but it's probably a little dangerously good. I could seriously drink this all night. Hedonist Beer Jive says check your prejudices at the door - 9.5/10!!