It’s funny, I’d always felt that the label of Aldi’s Fraser Briggs was a straight-out copy of James Boag’s premium lager. But, as you can see from the picture above, they’re not really that similar – aside from the black background and the waterfall on both labels (and the fact that both beers are named after a person I have no knowledge of) they’re not close to being identical.
And yet I still think of Briggs as a Boag’s copy. Except when it comes to flavour; I like the Briggs a lot more. But I wonder if that’s because of a brewing fault. You see, the thing I like about the Aldi premium lager is the fact that it has a slight banana flavour. It reminds me of a hefeweizen, and I have a soft spot for a hefeweizen.
Now I’m pretty sure that a lager isn’t supposed to taste anything like banana so I’m not sure why this one does. Surely they wouldn’t have brewed it with a hefeweizen yeast – that would just be weird. So this beer is quite a mystery to me. I got sent a six-pack of it and I’ll enjoy drinking all of it. I just won’t understand what’s going on with it.
Categories: bottle shop, Freebie, hefeweizen, lager, supermarket
BEER IS YOUR FRIEND 
I’ve smelled banana esters coming off a fast (warm) lager yeast propagation, so perhaps they ferment this too quickly. Does it always taste like banana?
Not sure, I’ve only tried the one bottle so far.
Hmmm…I reckon there is a few more similarities to Boags than the couple you’ve mentioned here: white writing with an all too similar font on a red background and lined with gold and black labels, both on the bottle body and neck; that the bottles are very similar shapes, and green; the main labels are on a very similar shape; black caps; that they both use the words ‘premium lager’…
I think I’ll try another of each, and hope my writing ends up like Homer’s one and only love letter to Marge…
C’Mon – you know the one…
I fucking hate this beer, I just brought a carton of it & drank 2 and its awful.
Unlucky
Perhaps you should be smart and buy one and taste it first
Who buys a whole cartoon of grog without trying one first?
Surely you are not trying to blame the beer for your stupid uneducated choice.
A good tradesmen never blames his tools.
You sir are not a tradesmen