Specifically, some of the parts in Munich. I was busy trying to learn why, in all of Germany, I was stuck in a town with some of the worst local beer in the country. I had a friend, wiser than I, who had decided to spend a year in Munich. This gave me a great excuse to visit every once in a while. German beer is good, Munich beer is divine. Although I could spend hours espousing the popular Pilseners, not to mention the stories resulting from said Pilseners, I'm going to concentrate on the Hefeweizens.
Beer is made from malt, generally barley malt. Mainstream American beer likes to subsidize that barley with things like rice and corn, which are significantly cheaper than barley, but also add that flavor that's so typical of all the American beers. On the other end of the scale, you can use wheat.
Wheat tends to be a little more difficult to brew with, as it has no husk, like barley does. This can be a real mess during mashing (making it into malt). Hence, it is almost always used in conjunction with barley, for manageability purposes.
Beer brewed with wheat tends to be much lighter in color that ales brewed with barley. The lighter color has resulted in Belgian and Berlin wheat beers being called White beers; in German this is Weissen. Bavarian wheat beers, are named for the wheat in them, or Weizen. To the uninitiated this is far more confusion than one can reasonably be expected to deal with, resulting in an intensified desire to just drink the beer, sending the confusion the way of the liver.
Sometimes, it isn't enough to use different grains. If you're going to be different, why use just one thing? Go crazy.
The full name, as mentioned above, was Hefeweizen. So the other half of the name is Hefe. Hefe is German for yeast. It refers to the bottle conditioning of the beer. Instead of filtering the beverage, for the completely clear characteristics we have come to expect in a beer, some more yeast and malt are added during bottling to carbonate the beer. The yeast eats the sugar, produces the CO2, and then generally precipitates to the bottom of the bottle.
Which brings us to the last cool part about Hefeweizens. Glassware.
You may have noticed, throughout the Goats comics, that when we drink beer it seems to always be out of long extended glasses, with pretty solid bases. These are traditional weizen glasses...and though I have no idea where they originated, they are ideal for properly pouring a hefeweizen.
The problem, is that the beer is unfiltered. Normally, when this is the case, you try to avoid getting the sediment into your glass, as with homebrew. But with a Hefeweizen, your goal is to pick up as much of that sediment as possible, and ideally, get it nicely diffused throughout the beer.
Which brings us to the purpose of this month's column. A year in Germany, and the only thing I learned was how to pour beer. The proper technique is to put the glass upside down over the bottle. Then turn the whole contraption over, so that the beer starts pouring into the glass. When there's enough beer there to cover the top of the bottle, turn it completely over, so that the bottle is upside down, and slowly pull the bottle out of the beer. The rate of bottle retraction is the true skill. Ideally you want to do it fast enough that your beer ends up with a nice head, but not so fast that it ends up all over you.
Assuming you still have most of your beer, this is when you roll the bottle on the table (or bar), and then swirl the last foam left in the bottle to get the last dregs of the sediment off of the sides and bottom, and pour it into the glass.
Oh yeah, and drink.
You should be noticing that this tastes largely unlike non-wheat beers. It's a lot sweeter. The taste people most often compare it to is bananas or clover, which is relatively accurate. It's also somewhat tangy, a tartness of a kind which one doesn't associate with beer. There is contention about putting a slice of lemon into the beer. I can take it or leave it... I think it looks kind of cool, and I enjoy the concentrated lemon taste it leaves in the last few sips of the beer, but purists contend that it ain't natural!
To throw out some names of weizen brewers, the weizen I usually drink down at The Peculier Pub, is Weihenstephaner, who claim to be the oldest brewery in the world. Jon tends to drink the Paulaner, which is one of the more popular versions, as is Franziskaner. Our friend George, upon who's floor I spent all that time in Munich, likes Erdinger, the biggest producer of Weizen beers in Germany.
A bunch of American micro-breweries are also making their own wheat beers now (they're not really called weizens, since we tend to speak English in American breweries). I've had some of these, mainly from the larger providers, such as Sam Adam's Cherry Wheat, and Pete's Wicked Honey Wheat. However, I haven't been too impressed with any of them, Americans are much better at other styles.
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And now, because I want to get some random information out there, I'll close with some completely unrelated pieces.
I received some letters from other brewers last month, which was a lot of fun, but prompted a desire in me to state a little more about my own brewing. I'm a novice. I brew because I have a deep love for the beverage, but I haven't been at it very long, and I haven't done very many batches. This is due partly to my inherent laziness, and partly to a lack of time and space. As much as I'd really like to do an all-grain brew, I don't have the equipment or space to try that, so for now I'm limited. I highly recommend brewing as a hobby for anyone. In addition what it teaches you, you feel great about anything you create. Also, as a beginner, I love hearing tips, tricks and techniques from anyone, especially when I'm wrong, since I need to learn somehow.
I'm thinking of either a Scottish Ale, or a wheat beer for my next batch, though Jon wants me to try and make something as much like Ipswich Dark Ale as possible. Comments, suggestions, and recipes are welcome!
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On a closing side note, I read Beer Blast by Philip Van Munching, this month. Although it's not much about beer as a beverage, this book, by a third generation importer of Heineken, has some great stories about how beer in America got to where it is. The insider stories about the marketing and advertising are highly amusing.
-- phillip karlsson, brew guru
september 1, 1997