Patio season is fully upon us, and your intrepid liquor reporter has been taking full advantage of the sunny days, whiling away the afternoons with a cold pint under a sun umbrella. The summer months also serve to usher in new and exciting beer styles.
Yes, gentle reader, gone are the Imperial Stouts and other heavy dark beers of winter, replaced with light and refreshing summer beers.
Wheat beers are perhaps the quintessential summertime libation, generally lighter in body than their barley-based cousins.
Calgary’s introduction to wheat beers came way back in 1994, when a young upstart brewery called Big Rock released Grasshopper Wheat Ale on an unsuspecting drinking public.
Your intrepid liquor reporter was but a novice boozer back in those days, and my inner beer snob was only starting to develop. Fortunately, I was working only a few blocks away from Bottlescrew Bills Olde English Pub in downtown Calgary in the early 90s, which was pretty much the only place in southern Alberta for craft beer at the time.
I can still recall my first pint of Grasshopper, and it was the beginning of a long and rewarding relationship. I had sampled a few other wheat beers in the past, but they had always been imported from Germany, so my first taste of Grasshopper showed me how much better beer can be when it is fresh.
Of the many styles of wheat beer, Grasshopper is classified as a Kristall Weizen, which translates from the original German as a clear wheat beer.
This style of beer has had all the yeast and suspended proteins filtered out, which tends to be more pleasing to the North American palate, as we have been trained to think that all beers should be nice and clear. This type of beer has a lighter taste than the cloudy wheat beers that are more popular in Europe, so is more approachable to the Coors Light-type of beer drinker.
The Kristall Weizen style of beer is a relative newcomer, as filtration technology was insufficient to remove the haze from wheat beers back in the middle ages, so everyone accepted a cloudy beer as the normal order of things until around a hundred years ago.
It took until close to the turn of the millennium for wheat beers to really take off in Alberta, as the teeming millions were content to continue suckling the brass teats of the megabreweries, who continued to spew out tasteless fizzy lagers.
Fortunately for the beer snobs of the world, the new millennium brought greater awareness of craft beer, and the popularity of wheat beers began to climb. We even saw a few megabreweries jump onto the wheat beer train, looking to control every corner of the market they could find.
Rickard’s White and Alexander Keith’s White are megabrewer examples of the Witbier style, which is a cloudy and unfiltered wheat beer style originally from Belgium.
Your humble narrator recalls sampling his first Rickard’s White ever so many years ago, and thinking it was like a watered-down Hoegaarden, which is the Belgian beer often considered the reigning champion of the Witbier style.
Rickard’s White (owned by Molson) and Alexander Keith’s White (owned by Labatt) are both popular wheat beers, using unique Belgian yeast strains that impart flavours of coriander and orange peel into the beer, which complements the spicy malt undertones provided by the suspended wheat proteins.
Attentive readers may have noticed that these beers are sometimes referred to as white instead of wheat.
Wheat proteins tend to much hazier than barley, so wheat beers usually still have suspended yeast and wheat particles in the beer, which gives it a hazy white appearance when chilled, so the names white and wheat often go together.
Although many wheat beers are extensively filtered to make them clear, adventurous brewmasters will leave the delicious yeast and wheat proteins suspended in their beer, allowing more conditioning and secondary fermentation to occur after bottling.
This makes for a more flavourful beer, so for those adventurous consumers not afraid to step away from their crystal-clear macrobrews, crack open a cloudy been and enjoy the flavour explosion.
So, the next time you’re at the local pub, remember that wheat isn’t just for making hamburger buns, and it can be much more enjoyable in liquid form!
