Our 45th Session will be hosted by Bruce Tichnor, who runs the Canadian BeerTaster.ca. He’s taking us back to our roots, to spend a cloudy afternoon with wheat beers, or has he describes it:
We wanted to get back closer to the roots of the Session and pick a topic which was simple and yet gives a wide range of interpretations so we chose, simply (or perhaps not so simply), Wheat Beers.
Feel free to take this topic in any direction you like, specific reviews, historical information, or any other twist you’d like to use. Wheat beers are a pretty wide topic and actually cover German style Weizen, Heffe Weizen, etc. along with Belgian style Witbier and even Flavoured Wheat beers.
There are very few guidelines here, just have some fun drinking Wheat Beers in the fall instead of the summer.
Whenever I see or hear the words “wheat beer”, my steel trap of a mind heads straight to the first beer that made me think that beer could be more than plain and watery. Thomas Kemper WeizenBerry which the RateBeer sites describes thusly, “This wheat-brewed beer is bursting with refreshing all-natural raspberry flavor.”
I drank a lot of that beer. Mainly because it was sparkly and fruity and low in alcohol. I did not care one bit of the Weizen part of the equation. It was all about the berry.
At the time it was probably one of the better NW beers out there. Nowadays, it would probably not rank high due to the prejudice against fruit beers and most wheat beers. And truth be told, if I was handed a bottle today, it probably would not taste or rank as well as I remember. Part of me is glad it is not made anymore. A treasured memory can’t be tarnished by your own self or made fun of by others.
Now, wheat beer conjures up a more complicated stream of thought. Which sub-style are we talking about? Is it German or American? Sessionable or not? All good questions and part of my evolution in craft beer but sometimes I wish I could go back to that first WeizenBerry and just really enjoy it, unencumbered by all the thought.