Beer & Me

Ask any craft brewer to name the brewery’s top three selling beers and odds are that list will include a wheat style beer. Ever since the craft beer renaissance caught traction wheat beer has been a favorite style of brewers and drinkers alike.

American wheat beer, now a unique style all its own, started as an interpretation of Hefeweizen. This Bavarian ale is pale, cloudy, effervescent, and full-bodied. The style was so popular among Munich drinkers back in the day that wheat was the first exception to the famous Rheinheitsgebot, the Bavarian beer purity law that previously only allowed beer to be made of water, barley, and hops. Hefeweizen is fermented with a yeast that contributes flavors to the beer unique to the style. The yeast is allowed to stay in the beer where it reinforces the flavors of spice and banana.

When American craft brewers decided to recreate the style, some went to the trouble and expensive of finding style-specific strains of yeast. Many simply used the house yeast, typically a much cleaner fermenting British ale yeast. Using such a yeast produces a beer with a much different flavor profile. While the unfiltered versions of this style are visually virtually identical to Hefeweizen, the taste is much cleaner. The suspended yeast does contribute very subtle hints of spice but gone is the banana taste. The result is a beer that is very refreshing but still full bodied.

Almost every wheat beer comes unfiltered and the yeast sediment at the bottom of the bottle is intended to be part of the beer. When pouring this beer pour most of it in the glass as you would any other beer but leave 1/3 or 1/4 of beer in the bottle. Then swirl this beer to lift it from the bottom and pour it in the glass. You’ll notice the beer get cloudier but, trust me, this yeasty goodness makes it a whole different and much more flavorful beer.

I’ve long complained about a style that rose out of the craft beer revolution known as American wheat beer. The original Bavarian wheat beer known as Hefeweizen uses a unique ale yeast that gives the beer a spicy flavor and aroma with strange but completely enjoyable hints of banana. The flavor is pronounced in the finished beer but it’s even more apparent if the brew is left unfiltered with the tasty yeast suspended in it.

American craft brewers took this idea of unfiltered wheat beer except that they didn’t use the same sort of yeast – they use a regular, clean fermenting yeast. So what is left was a largely flavorless, sweet beer with a lot of body (thanks to the wheat).

I’ve always complained about the style but rarely find an ally among other beer geeks.

But could I have been wrong? Tonight I tried a beer from Schlafly in St. Louis, MO that was labeled Hefeweizen. I expected the usual Amercan flavorless version and, as I expected, this one did not use the proper Bavarian yeast. But still it was very tasty. Spicy and sweet but very good. I may have to give this whole style a second look.

A couple of years ago a buddy – let’s call him Kyle since that’s his name - and I visited the Great Divide brewery in Denver. We were looking at the tee shirts that they had for sale. Kyle refused to buy any of them because every shirt had the brewery’s motto on it – “great minds drink alike.” He couldn’t bring himself to wear such a patently false statement because, he argued, he knew some really smart people that drank really bad beer.

This is how I feel about American style wheat beer. Bavarian wheat beer or hefeweizen is a lovely drink. Its distinct flavor and aroma of bananas and spice come from a particular strain of yeast. Wheat, which contributes much less flavor than barley, serves to reduce the malty flavor of the brew and give this yeast a place to shine. But American style wheat beer doesn’t use this yeast. Instead it uses a common, clean fermenting ale yeast. So the beer has very little malt flavor, low hops and much less flavor from the yeast than its German brother. In other words it is a flavorless beer.

But the kick in the head here is that so very many craft beer lovers also love American style wheat. Beer lovers whose taste in beer I respect always amaze me when they order and savor this particular style. So, in the end I suppose Kyle was right.

(By the way, this is not an indictment of all of the wheat beer brewed by American brewers. Many great wheat beers are brewed by them. American style wheat beer is a particular style. How can you tell the difference? Ask what kind of yeast that they use to make the beer.)