Friday Beer Blogging – A Hefe-Weizen And More

Now that summer has abruptly fallen over and died, in the mid-Atlantic states anyway, I figure that it is seasonally-inappropriate enough to take another look at the hefe-weizen style. Hefes come from a mix of wheat and malted barley that gives a crisp texture reminiscent of citrus and sunshine, perfect for serving with an orange slice on a hot terrace, and the usually-unfiltered style often leaves behind a pleasant depth of yeast protein. Hefes are hardly insubstantial but the lighter-than-lager crispness is usually the opposite of what I personally look for in a beer.

Maybe I was due. Plus readers have been asking me about the Pyramid brewery for a while, so I jumped at the chance to pick up a rare sixer of their hefe at Kazansky’s.

Pyramid’s brew strikes me as a hefe for people who like ales. It pours a cloudy straw color with a meager head, no lacing, and a slight malty smell. You don’t get much of that wheat tang here or those fruit elements of a wheat-heavy hefe. This is more of a mild ale laced with a bit of wheat tang and fleshed out with a protein haze that doesn’t add much in the way of noticeable flavor. Par for this style the hopping is minimalist, but without it the beer tastes malty with a sweetish aftertaste. The beer didn’t offend me in any way, and my wife seems pretty fond of it, so don’t take this as a negative review. It just didn’t leave a major impression. BAers give it an indifferent shrug.

Speaking of summer beers, I have a question after trying the summer-themed #10 from Lagunitas. Has anybody had a product from that brewery that wasn’t hopped well past the comfort level of the average drinker? I thought that the summer style usually calls for a crisp, light-drinking brew with low specific gravity. Thinking about a session of Lagunitas gives me an ulcer. Now that I have tried more of the edgy west coast brews like Lagunitas and the West Coast IPA from Green Flash I can propose my definition of the west coast new wave style: the malt is fermented almost completely to alcohol and hops are added to ridiculous proportions, resulting in a relatively dry, bitterly hopped, big beer. Before I described it as the beer equivalent of show dogs but maybe it seems more like the tattooed subculture of urban bicyclists who ride cheap road bikes with a fixed gears and upturned Eddie Mercxx caps. Edgy and not necessarily inviting to newcomers, but rewarding as hell if that’s your thing.

Back to summer beers, the Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema from Anderson Valley in far northern CA made me shake my head a little bit. I always have room in the fridge for a tasty, light copper ale in the style that I remember from the mountain west (e.g., Fat Tire from New Belgium). However the bottle is a bit vague about where the ‘Cerveza Crema,’ or cream beer, comes from, mentioning something about how the beer tastes cool when you drink it. From what I can tell it’s a cream beer because the brewers added tartaric acid, the key flavor in cream soda, somewhere in the brewing process. If you like the idea of a beer-cream soda hybrid (that might be a popular style that I just don’t know about) then definitely check it out.