The annual New World Beer & Cider Awards were decided recently, with a new twist: the awarding of a supreme champion.
Every year the awards acknowledge a Top-30 — the best of the best out of more than 600 entries — and is a good reference point if you’re looking to try something new with confidence.
But for the first time the awards picked out one beer to rule them all and the winner was … Emerson’s Weissbier. This is a good news story for so many reasons, and the highest on the list is that it goes a long way to educating Kiwis about a beer style that we’re not too familiar with.
Weissbier translates from the German as “wheat beer” and you’ll often see these styles described as Hefeweizen, which means “wheat with yeast”. That just means the beer is unfiltered, so there’s some yeast still in the beer (which is totally OK to drink). There are other versions such as Kristallweizen, which is a clarified (crystal clear) version, or Dunkelweizen (dark wheat).
There are a few reasons these beers haven’t caught on in New Zealand despite being a staple in Germany for 500 years or more. First is the weird spelling (pronounce it as vice-beer and you won’t go wrong), but because of the wheat content Weissbier is very cloudy and produces a large pillowy white head. Historically Kiwis thought cloudy beer was “off” and we didn’t like beers with big heads on because we thought we were getting short-changed on volume. (I believe this harks back to the 1950s when there were huge arguments over the price of beer and how much volume should be in a glass and punters would accuse bartenders of ‘short-pouring’ by creating a big head on a beer … but that’s a story for another day).
When Richard Emerson first brewed his Weissbier in 1995 he struggled to sell it for all those reasons. But the brewery re-released it this year because they thought the market here had matured enough to appreciate it.
Partly that’s to do with the rise of hazy IPAs — we are now OK with beer that’s not crystal clear. And we now appreciate that beer can come in all sorts of flavours besides bitter.
And that’s where Weissbier is worth trying because the special German yeasts that are used result in a beer that has strong notes of banana and a bubblegum sweetness. There’s also a spicy character that resembles clove.
The Emerson’s Weissbier is a perfect example of this centuries-old classic German style. Some other good alternatives include the Tuatara Hefeweizen, Zeelandt Bishop’s Kick, Altitude Brewing Persistent High and Rhyme X Reason Big Banana (which sums up the flavour!).
So next time you’re perusing the shelves for a hazy IPA, maybe consider the original hazy and try a “vice-beer”.
Michael Donaldson
hoppiness.co.nz