The Beer Style Time Forgot
For about six months, the folks at Craft Beer & Brewing were remiss on posting my “Style School” columns online. Then in the past couple weeks they posted two of them. If you missed grodziskie, it’s here. Today, however, I’d like to talk about American wheats, posted Monday. In that piece, I detail their origins and development. I generally try to approach articles with fresh eyes rather than relying on previous work. But, since I wrote the book on the Widmer Brothers, I couldn’t help but start with the first big name among American wheat ales.
The Widmer brothers had founded their brewery on the bet that what the city’s drinkers wanted was a hoppy altbier. Elder brother Kurt had spent time apprenticing at Uerige in Düsseldorf, to learn how to make it, and he and brother Rob refined that beer—and only that beer—back home. Five months after they opened the doors of their small, makeshift brewery, however, they were discovering that… it may not have been such a hot bet.
Of course, that failure led Rob and Kurt to abandon the idea of a single beer. Kurt turned to one of his most likable homebrew recipes as a choice for beer number two. It was Hefeweizen, and the rest was history. American wheat ales would become the most popular style Pacific Northwest for the next twenty years, made by most breweries across the region. In a separate development, Midwest breweries started their own tradition of brewing light wheat ales, and it’s very telling that the beers they brewed closely resembled those in the Northwest. Telling because, as I argue in the piece, in some ways these wheat ales were the quintessential American beer during the period. That the two regions independently started making very similar, and historically novel, types of beer says something about the American philosophy at the time.
American pale ales, made even before the wheat ales, were certainly a more important style both in terms of sales and influence. But brewers didn’t invent them out of whole cloth: with pale ales, they were recreating a British style—even if they did depart pretty seriously from the originals.
Wheats, on the other hand, had no precedent:
Starting with wheat as an ingredient rather than a tradition, breweries intuitively found their way to a similar kind of beer whether they were making it in Kalama or Kalamazoo. Drinkers also found it intuitive: It was familiar enough to pass for beer but different enough to seem daring—a perfect envoy for the early craft era…. They were one of the few styles Americans brewed that weren’t based on imitation, and they represented an authentically new kind of beer.
All of this is sort of interesting history, especially given the enduring popularity of American wheat ales. They may not rival IPAs, but most of the original brands popular in the 90s are still around. Yet maybe it’s not that interesting: American wheat is a style in which the discussion around it is inversely proportional to its success. People may still buy them, but they don’t talk or write about them.
Here’s something more interesting: perhaps American wheat ales are due for an update. I’d like to draw your attention to a recent example of this style that recently blew me away. Those of you who subscribe to my newsletter will know what I’m talking about:
Grand Fir Summerfield
This dry-hopped American wheat is not your grandfather’s heffa-wye-sen. It has a gorgeous aroma, lemony, limey, and what is that—peach? The flavor carries through almost one-for-one with the aroma, except that the malts add both that soft wheatiness you expect, with an incredible silky softness and a hint of honey. I will be thinking about this one for a long, long time.
That’s a “Beer Sherpa” entry from late March. Unbeknownst to me, brewer Whitney Burnside had sent it to the World Beer Cup, where it would go on to win a medal (one of three for Grand Fir). Whitney wins a lot of awards, and it was a tremendous beer, so serendipity aside, it wasn’t that shocking. What was borderline shocking is that she won the award in the “American-style wheat beer category.”
Summerfield is hoppy. The hop levels are in harmony with the underlying style—the malts play a big role in the flavor palate, and the hop intensity levels, both flavor and aroma, are appropriate for the style. By historic standards, it is really hoppy, though. That citrus aroma, bright at a bell, pours out of the glass. The peachiness gives it a seasonal sun-warmed quality. It would have shocked Kurt and Rob back in the mid-eighties. I am really surprised that judges allowed such a vividly modern American wheat on the medal dais—but good on ‘em for expanding their definition.
Because, delightfully, that hoppiness is itself purely American, and represents an obvious update for a fusty Summerfield is an example of the first-gen homebrewer-based wheat married with the modern American-hopped ale IPA tradition. I was so impressed with the beer because, as much as I like traditional American wheats, this was just more. Summerfield still rests perfectly in that summer-drinking place, and would be perfect on a beach, next to a mountain lake, or while mowing the lawn. But it is lively and delicious in the palate.
All the trend guides say drinkers today are “flavor-oriented,” which is why so many drink canned cocktails and other fruity concoctions. They also like simple, unchallenging tipples that are easy on the pocketbook. Perhaps breweries could exploit these trends with modern, whirlpool-and-dry-hopped American wheats. They tick all the boxes, and they will please the beer nerds to boot. And it would be cool to see an authentically American style come back into the discussion.