Here’s yet another new brewery for me, and a fairly new one overall: Yee Haw of Johnson City, Tennessee. Breweries are popping up everywhere these days, which is a good thing I think. Many people worry they are reaching the saturation point. I just think more people need to give up their boring macrolagers and switch to something tasty and local. Anyway, Yee Haw seems to have opened sometime in 2015. They don’t say so on their website, but their first blog post is from February of that and references construction.

I picked up a bottle of Yee Haw Dunkel at Wild Hare Beer Company in Nashville. Their beers are sold here though Johnson City is located north of Asheville, North Carolina in that small area of Tennessee that juts out to the northeast near the Virginia and North Carolina state line. North of Asheville and west of Charlotte, Raleigh Durham and Winston-Salem puts you in the heart of great beer territory. Yee Haw will have to be really good to thrive here.

But are they good? They think they’re good, I’ll give them that. On their website they say:

Our beer is as good as it gets

OK, we’ll allow them some puffing rights, but in this area, they’re going to have to work to prove that.

Here’s what they say about their Dunkel:

**Bronze award winner at the 2016 World Beer Cup for European-Style Dark/Muenchner Dunkel!! **

Rich, deep and complex, our Munich Dunkel is many things, but heavy isn’t one of them. This classic German dark lager is the beer style that started it all for our Brewmaster. Take the time to savor it slowly and you’ll find flavors of biscuits, cocoa and caramel. To enjoy life on the dark side, just say…YEE-HAW!

Yee Haw Dunkel has an alcohol content of 5.5% by volume with 25 to 30 IBUs they say. It was running $9.99 a six-pack in Nashville.

Yee Haw Dunkel pours to a dark brown color with a thick creamy head and a luscious dark nutty nose. Taking a sip, the beer is full in body with delightful chocolate chip cookie notes and a gentle grassy, lightly bitter hop finish.

Malts define a dunkel and this one has them in abundance. One gets the cocoa and the biscuit, combining to remind me of chocolate chip cookies, though I didn’t find the caramel. Is this as good as beer gets? No, it’s not. It is darned tasty though and credible to style. OK, when I drank it maybe I did yell YEE-HAW! But don’t tell anyone OK?

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