Wharf Rd Wheat Beer

Ah Wheat Beer! Lovely, lovely Wheat Beer. No Summer’s day is complete without it. Cold, cloudy, light, fragrant, foamy, crisp yet rounded. I could drink pint after pint of it and often do.

So what exactly is this wonderous brew?

Well, for a start it is made from malted wheat, usually about 50% of the mash along with pale malted barley. Wheat has it’s own particular character when made into beer. Dry, grainy and complex. It can be tricky to make though as wheat has no husk like barley does and tends to be slow in the lauter tun. The style developed in both Germany and Belgium over many years. The Belgians make theirs in a number of ways, usually spiced with coriander and orange peel or as the base for their Lambic beers.

(We did try the Belgian style once, but the orange and coriander were hard to source and use on our system without having to compromise and use flavouring additives which just seemed like the wrong approach.)

In Germany, there is a fine, though rather sharp tasting, wheat beer made in Berlin but this is a bit hard to acquire a taste for and needs a rather ‘feral’ yeast to make properly. We have enough problem with feral yeasts drifting in from the surrounding vineyards thank you very much without bringing in extra ones.

But in Bavaria they have the perfect style for our purposes. The beer is known as ‘Hefe Weizen’ and is a staple of beer culture throughout southern Germany. It is pale, unfiltered and very lightly hopped. The yeast used is a particular strain that contributes a unique aroma of cloves, banana and even that rather alarming pink bubble gum that anyone over forty might remember from their childhood.

The fascinating aspect to Bavarian style Wheat Beer is how incredibly simple and basic it is. With pretty much any other style of beer there are countless ways to play around with the formula, add things, take things away, change the colour or body and generally put your own signature to it. But with Wheat Beer you simply do the minimum of mucking about. You take the most basic of ingredients, brew them up with the lightest of touches and use the right yeast. Getting your own particular slant on the style is amazingly hard to do without making it crass, vulgar and untrue to it’s purity.

This is why brewers love it so much. It is the great minimalist beer and the key note to making it properly is restraint.

But that’s the technical stuff. What’s it like to drink?

Imagine the scene….It’s a hot day in February. The sun is shining and the breeze is barely enough to keep the air moving. The brewery patio is filling up nicely with thirsty people. But none as thirsty as you. You’ve done a big walk, perhaps up to Stony Batter or been out fishing since before dawn. Maybe you’ve been mowing the lawn or playing some form of sport. Whatever. The fact is you have, as the Australians put it; ‘A Thirst You Could Photograph’.

So you do the sensible thing and ask the nice server to bring you a Wheat Beer. It arrives in a glass already frosted with condensation. The foamy head looks enticing and there is a fresh slice of lemon in there to bring out the full flavour of the wheat. You NEED this beer. Yet you know that you need to inhale the aroma first so you hold the glass beneath your nose to inhale the deep perfumy and spicy notes mingling with the citrus bite of the lemon and the richness of Pacifica hops.

Ah yes...

Now you can drink it. Cold and refreshing, light, yet somehow rich as well. How did it take so long for New Zealand to discover this beer? In the early 90’s it was pretty much unheard of here. Even the Aussies had this one figured out before we did. And why not? On a hot Summer day this is indeed the perfect beer.

You dwell on this for a moment and then realise that you have somehow managed to finish your glass without even realising. Don’t worry. Wheat Beer has that effect on you and we have plenty more where that one came from.

And that, my friends, is what it’s like to drink Wheat Beer.