American Wheat Beer serves as a handy category for beer competitions, but there is no such style.
Granted, making a wheat beer the house light beer has been standard practice at brewpubs for more than twenty years. But those hardly represent the variety of beers American brewers are making outside any defined style. Few are as brazen as Nick Floyd of Three Floyds Brewing in Indiana, who said, “Most American wheat beer is boring. For me (American wheat) is the Miller Lite of the brewpub chains.” He brewed his own hop-centric Gumballhead to prove “American wheat beer doesn’t suck.”
Brewers don’t need to write recipes for wheat beers quite that full of hop flavor and aroma to make them interesting. Consider a couple of newcomers, Dundee Summer Wheat from Rochester, N.Y., and 7th Street Wheat from NOLA Brewing in New Orleans.
Quite honestly, the Dundee Summer Wheat has a few handicaps to overcome — at least with a certain crowd. That the brewery was once Genesee Brewing, and also High Falls, and is now owned by North American Breweries . . . does not sit well with drinkers who have not given many Dundee products high ratings at online sites.
Additionally, Dundee previously produced a beer simply called Wheat Beer that did not receive very good marks. It was discontinued before Dundee Brewer Jim McDermott (@dundeebrewer) began working on this beer from scratch. Summer Wheat is different, though not intended to knock your socks off. “The style can be fairly nondescript. We were looking for a little snap in the finish,” McDermott said. Malted wheat constitutes 35 percent of fermentables, rye a “couple of percentage points.”
That provides the first part of the snap, hops the second part. With less than 20 bittering units Summer Wheat it doesn’t pack nearly the punch of Widmer Hefeweizen, for instance, but a solid dose of Cascade and Centennial hops for flavor and aroma deliver citrus and grapefruit notes.
“It’s definitely an audience thing,” McDermott said. Take a look at the beer rating sites and you’ll read complaints the beer is cloudy but doesn’t taste like a (banana/clovy) German hefeweizen. At 4.5% abv and fermented with Dundee’s house ale yeast that wasn’t the plan. This is a beer thtn Nick Floyd might call boring, but a pretty good size crowd is finding refreshing.
To be honest, though, I’d go first for NOLA’s 7th Street Wheat — also a modest 4.5% abv, lightly hopped (15 IBU) — because the addition of fresh lemon basil both brightens the aroma and adds a little pop at the finish.
The brewery had to delay the release of 7th Street, earlier this month, for 10 days. Brewmaster Peter Caddoo and crew added lemon basil after fermentation in a small test batch and were happy with the results. That wasn’t the case with the first pass on a full-size batch.
So they tossed in (a “whole bunch,” according to brewery founder Kirk Coco) more lemon basil in the bright tank. If that hadn’t worked they were prepared to dump the whole batch. It worked. I have no idea what they would have done with the taphandles (pictured at the top) otherwise. The result is a beer that goes down too easy on a muggy New Orleans summer evening (is there any other kind?).
7th Street is subtle, but with character this is not easily overwhelmed. Just for fun, NOLA’s brewers added blueberries — it’s that season in Louisiana — to a firkin. By happy circumstance The Avenue Pub poured it a day after we got to New Orleans two weeks ago. (To be perfect accurate, as you can see, owner Polly Watts pulled pints from a handpump.)
The blueberries rounded the flavor, but the lemon basil still controlled the finish.
Now let’s back up. We are talking about a rather tame wheat-based beer. Lemon basil added. Then blueberries, in a firkin. Served from a handpump. On a muggy New Orleans evening. How many things could have gone wrong?
It makes a brewer think she or he can take a few chances with wheat.
