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.

Foreword By Yvan De Baets
Introduction
About the Book

Part I – Wheat, the Other Brewing Grain
1 Wheat, Beer, and Bread
2 Wheat Basics: Why Is My Beer Cloudy?
  - Partly Cloudy to Cloudy
  - Twenty-First Century Solutions
  - You Say 4-Vinyl Guaiacol, I Say Clove
  - The German View

Part II – The White Beers of Belgium
3 In Search of the Real Belgian White
  - Biere Blanche de Louvain
  - The Peeterman
  - Biere de Hougaerde

4 The Six Degrees of Pierre Celis
On March 13, 1966, Pierre Celis brewed his first official batch of Oud Hoegaards Bier. Brouwerij Celis was in business, and eventually that business would take him (and wit) to the United States.

  - It All Started With a White
     Visiting Allagash Brewing, where White accounts for 80 percent of production.
  - The Best-Selling American Wheat Beer Ever
     The story behind Blue Moon White.
  - Treating the Spices Right
     Bavik in Belgium approaches spice additions differently.
  - Acting Green and Looking White
     How Mothership Wit became new Belgium’s first organic beer.
  - Two Times White Is Still White
     A stronger version of White turned into Southampton Brewing’s most popular beer.
  - A Taste of Leuven?
     Jolly Pumpkin Calabaza Blanca takes wit to the wild side.

5 A Recipe for Wit
From Jean-Francois Gravel of Dieu de Ciel! in Montreal.

Part III – The Weiss Beers of Southern Germany
6 A Fallen Style Returns to Glory
The rise and fall, and rise again, of weizen in Southern Germany. The revival began at Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn. Brewmaster Hans-Peter Drexler provides a step-by-step tour through the very traditional production of Scheider Weisse Original.

7 Bavarian Tradition With a Wyoming Accent
Introduced only in 2005, Schönramer Festweisse also adheres to tradition, including bottle conditioning with speise.

  - Meet the Other Schneider
    “You brew the beer right, you serve it fresh, it is not a problem.”
  - The Beers Are Smoked, The Wheat Isn’t
    Perhaps all wheat beers were once smoky; Schlenkerla Rauchweizen still is.
  - An Open Fermentation Policy
    Sierra Nevada Brewing new Kellerweis uses “old” methods.
  - Making Adjustments in New Jersey
    Greg Zaccardi insists using a decoction mash still makes a difference.
  - Don’t Be Nice to Weiss
    “I treat it like a redheaded stepchild.”

8 A Recipe for Hefeweizen
From homebrewer Bill Aimonetti.

Part IV – The Wheat Beers of America
9 A Hefeweizen By Any Other Name . . .
America had little in the way of a wheat beer tradition before Kurt and Rob Widmer a game-changing cloudy beer that would help define a new style, American Hefeweizen.

10 Brewing in a Melting Pot
New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin is well known for a variety of beers, but no American brewery is better equipped to brew traditional wheat beer.

  - Beer From America’s Breadbasket
    Wheat beers account for 70 percent of production at Boulevard Brewing.
  - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
    Although a “seasonal,” Oberon is Bell’s best-selling beer.
  - Summer Ale on the Oregon Coast
    Pelican Pub & Brewery takes a lesson from Great Britain.
  - Wheat Wine: The Beer
    A “style” born at Rubicon Brewing in Sacramento.
  - A Beer for the Punk Comic Crowd
    Gumballhead was brewed to prove “American wheat beer doesn’t suck.”

11 Two Recipes for Wheat Wine
Steven Pauwels of Boulevard Brewing and Todd Ashman of FiftyFifty Brewing take two different approaches in offering recipes for a wheat wine.

Part V – Wheat Beers From the Past
12 Beers the Reinheitsgebot Never Met
Berliner weisse and Gose from northern Germany have a long, sour and sometimes glorious history. A look at how they were brewed and how they are made today in Berlin and Leipzig.

13 The Care and Brewing of Relics
Nodding Head Brewery & Restaurant in Philadelphia has become the second largest Berliner weisse producer in the world. Granted that’s only 50 barrels (1,500 gallons) annually but interesting things are happening with old styles.

14 Four Resurrected Recipes
Recipes for Berliner weisse, for Gose, for Lichtenhainer and for Grätzer from homebrewer Kristen England.

Part VI – Putting It All Together
15 Judging and Enjoying, Brewing Tips Included
  - Belgian White/Wit
  - German Weizens
  - American Wheat
  - Berliner Weisse
  - Gose
  - Don’t Forget the Pour

Part V – End Matter
Appendix – Yeast charts

I’m particularly interested in hearing for people who drink these beers as well as those seeking advice about how to brew them well. Please leave your question as a comment.