American Hefes

Z July 12, 2006 Beers of The Times It's Hot. Drink Your Wheat. By ERIC ASIMOV WHEAT beer. It sounds healthy and almost bready, like something you might find in a New Age fantasy. Imagine the wheat beer arriving as you complete your mud bath and aromatherapy, hypnotic music in the background, something to sip as you slip into your Birkenstocks and float away. Not to harsh the mellow, but aargh! Regardless of how it sounds, wheat beer has brewski credentials. It is the quintessential summer quencher, just right for Nascar races and baseball games. Now, that is a fantasy worth having - sitting in Yankee Stadium with a glass of cold hefeweizen, the leading south German style of wheat beer, its lively bubbles and tart, brisk flavors ready to quash the steamy heat of any July night. It would go just as well with hot dogs as with the traditional Bavarian veal sausages and pretzel bread. Instead, ballparks prefer to serve insipid, tasteless beer that might be better dumped into the mud bath than consumed, at inflated prices to boot. Is this world crazy? Now the mellow is truly harshed. In an effort to ensure sanity in the heat, the tasting panel recently sampled 24 wheat beers. We were looking for American versions of Bavarian-style brews, mostly out of curiosity. American craft brewers have been creative in taking European styles in unexpected directions, and we anticipated more of the same in the wheat beer category. Leave it to our wily tasting director, Bernard Kirsch, though, to throw in a few German sleepers. I'll get back to that shortly. Florence Fabricant and I were joined for the tasting by Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery, and Fred Dexheimer, wine director of the BLT restaurants in New York. First things first: How did wheat get into the brew in the first place? In its purest form, beer is made solely of malted barley, water, yeast and hops. Among grains, barley's association with brewing comes naturally. Its c haracteristic hard husk makes it easier for brewers to employ without clogging up their equipment, as happens with a grain like wheat, which has no husk and can gum up the works. Barley's high starch content breaks down easily into sugars, which are then converted by yeast into alcohol. Wheat, by contrast, with its elastic glutens, is well suited to making bread; unlike barley, which becomes dry and crumbly in the hands of a baker. Perfect division of labor, right? Barley for beer, wheat for bread. Humans resist this form of natural selection. Brewers have long looked to other grains beyond barley for their beer. Oats are used in stout and rye is used in Eastern Europe to make kvass. Mass-market brewers add rice to lager beers, which stretches out the brew while contributing to a light, subdued - some might say characterless - flavor, or corn, which contributes a sort of sweetness. And then there is wheat. Given the difficulty that brewers have with wheat, you would think they would leave it for the bakers. But brewers found that the addition of wheat contributed a bracing liveliness to the beer that made it worth the extra trouble. In Germany and Belgium, the two centers of wheat beer production, brewers settled on a proportion of 50 percent to 60 percent wheat, with barley making up the rest. In Belgium, the wheat beer is often flavored with orange peel and coriander. But in Bavaria, brewers developed a particular kind of ale yeast that imparts a most unusual flavor to the beer: clove, citrus, smoke and, you'll taste for yourself, banana and bubblegum. As odd as it sounds, it's tremendously refreshing and goes well with a wide variety of spicy foods. The beer is called hefeweizen; weizen for wheat and hefe for yeast. It is almost always unfiltered, which gives hefeweizen its characteristically cloudy, hazy appearance. As we expected, the American wheat beers were all over the map, with brewers taking great liberties with the style. This caused no small amount of consternation among the panel, particularly with those beers that styled themselves hefeweizen. Magic Hat Circus Boy, for example, calls itself a hefeweizen, yet it has a floral aroma that is wholly uncharacteristic of the style. Widmer Hefeweizen, which the panel rejected, was another beer that bore little relation to the style. "You're trading on the good name of an actual, established style to sell something that's different,'' Mr. Oliver said, likening such uses of the term hefeweizen to labeling American white wines as Chablis. "It's confusing and frustrating.'' Magic Hat had a second beer in the tasting, Hocus Pocus, which we rated higher for its better balance. Unlike the Circus Boy, it did not call itself a hefeweizen, a good thing since it seemed to be more in a Belgian style. Our top beer was the Brooklyn Brewery's Brooklyner Weisse, which seemed dead on in its approximation of the clove, smoke and banana aromas, and brisk, refreshing texture of a hefeweizen. Mr. Oliver didn't identify it as his own beer, but was unembarrassed by the panel's unanimous approval. Among our other favorites, the Flying Dog In-Heat was a fine, lively version of the hefeweizen style, while the Samuel Adams was a little more sedate, unlike the Ramstein, which so overflowed with hefeweizen flavors that it seemed a bit overwrought. We liked the Smuttynose, though it seemed maybe more Belgian than German in style, and we enjoyed both the Butternuts Heinnieweisse, which is sold in cans, and the Harpoon UFO, which both seemed true to the German aromas and flavors. Some of the beers seemed not to be in very good condition. The panel rejected a Weyerbacher hefeweizen, a Penn Weizen and a Rogue Half-E-Weizen, all of which seemed well past their primes. Mr. Oliver pointed out that wheat beers are among the most difficult to make properly. "They're very delicate and they must be insistently fresh,'' he said. "When you lose that, the beers tend to fall apart.'' Which brings us to the three authentic German hefeweizens, which Mr. Kirsch slipped into the tasting. One, from Erdinger, did not make the cut, but the other two, from Schneider and Franziskaner, might well have been our top beers of the tasting. It was a tribute to Mr. Dexheimer's acumen that he picked those two beers as the truest hefeweizens in the tasting. Then there were the American originals, like the Hop Sun summer wheat beer from Southern Tier Brewing Company in Lakewood, N.Y. This beer might as well have been a pale ale, for all the piney hop aroma that screamed from the glass, not at all typical of a wheat beer. It had a pale ale bitterness, too. It didn't make our top 10, since we were looking for wheat beer styles. But you know what? It would be mighty fine at a ballgame, too. Tasting Report: A Classic Balance of Spice and Banana, American Style Brooklyn Brewery Brooklyner Weisse $1.40 (12 ounces) 3 stars Lively with classic aromas of clove, banana and smoke; refreshing. Flying Dog In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen $1.60 (12 ounces) 2½ stars Smoky, spicy, toasty aromas; fresh and harmonious. Samuel Adams Hefeweizen $1.40 (12 ounces) 2½ stars Tart, toasty and refreshing; bright though not especially distinctive. Magic Hat Hocus Pocus $2 (12 ounces) 2½ stars Lean and somewhat austere, with lively citrus and herbal flavors. Smuttynose Summer Weizen $1.50 (12 ounces) 2 stars Creamy texture with pronounced clove and smoke flavors. Ramstein Blonde Wheat Beer $1.50 (12 ounces) 2 stars Brassy and loud, with classic flavors that shout out. Butternuts Beer and Ale Heinnieweisse $1.30 (12 ounces) 2 stars Fruity, spicy aromas; pleasing and easy to drink. Harpoon UFO Hefeweizen $1.50 (12 ounces) 2 stars Lively yet restrained with flavors of banana and clove. Magic Hat Circus Boy $1.50 (12 ounces) 1½ stars Unusual floral aromas; tart and lean. Sierra Nevada Wheat $1.60 (12 ounces) 1½ stars Light-bodied, lemon-flavored and pleasant.