Bavaria, best known for its smooth, clean, bottom-fermented lager biers, is synonymous with great brewing tradition. Golden pilsners, Munich helles, seasonal marzen and bocks, and the indigenous brew, Munich dunkel, all call Bavaria home. But there is a family of beers that runs counter to these lagers in almost every aspect: the Bavarian wheat beers.
Wheat beers, more than any other broad style of beer, may be defined by complexity rather than by a couple of distinct attributes.
Eccentric and old-fashioned, the wheat beers are cloudy, quirky, spritzy and top-fermented. Ripe with odd flavors and aromas not usually acceptable in beers, never mind German brews, wheat beers are riding a wave of popularity and now enjoy a collective market share of well over 20 percent in Germany. This was not always the case. It took the foresight of an astute German brewing patriarch to resuscitate this almost-extinct type of beer a century and a half ago.
Wheat beers are today as much a way of Bavarian life as pretzels and sausage. In fact, the German tradition of brotzeit (bread time), the mid-morning respite equivalent to a coffee break, often includes wheat beer as a refresher. These brews can’t be beat for quenching the thirst, and enough variations are available to satisfy any whim or occasion.
There are four different versions of wheat beers, the most common of which is weissebier (white beer), because of its haziness and relatively light color, or weizenbier (wheat beer). The wheat, weizen and weisse appellations can be used interchangeably. There are also strong (weizenbock), filtered (kristall), and dark (dunkelweizen) types of the style. All have a distinctive footprint in common that separates them from the rest of beerdom.
Wheat beers may not suit every palate but are certainly worth a taste. They are likely to grow on you.
Wheat Beer History: Cloudy Early, Becoming Clear
It is generally accepted that brewing had a rather serendipitous beginning and, as wheat is one of the oldest cultivated grains in the world, it should come as no surprise that this grain found its way into early fermented beverages. Stored grains became wet, the ubiquitous wild yeast fermented the resulting mixture, and people consumed the liquid, only to discover its unusual flavor, nutritive value, and, of course, its pleasantly intoxicating effect.
The earliest evidence of brewing, about 5,000 years ago, is from the Fertile Crescent, and it is known that wheat was used to some extent in Babylonia thousands of years ago. Though the brewers of antiquity eventually determined that barley was better for brewing and wheat for food, wheat no doubt remained a common if not vital component of ancient beers.
Brewing then spread from the Fertile Crescent northward into what is now Europe through the Middle Ages. References to wheat in brewing are known from the 15th to the 17th centuries in Germany, Austria and Bohemia. But the history and significance of wheat beer brewing is much less nebulous about this time in and around Bavaria.
The first true weissebier brewery was built in the 15th century in the Bavarian village of Schwarzach by the noble family, the Degenbergers. Although the Reinheitsgebot purity law, decreed in 1516, did not allow wheat malt to be used, the Degenberger clan was allowed to continue producing weissebier because of their grandfathered tenure in the brewing industry. Weissebier was also the preferred beer of the royalty.
When the last of the Degenbergers died, control of the brewery fell to the ruling Bavarian dukes, the Wittelsbachs, authors of the Reinheitsgebot. They set up shop next to their brown beer (dunkels) brewery in Munich. This is now the site of the famous Hofbrauhaus Munich.
As the new proprietors of the weissebier brewery, the Wittelsbachs became the sole purveyors of wheat beer in Bavaria. Noticing that the masses were quite enamored with this notorious noble brew, the Wittelsbachs expanded their domain and built many more weissebier breweries in southern Germany to capitalize on their product’s popularity. The dukes required the pubs they controlled to serve not only their dunkels but also their weissebier, lest the pub’s privileges be revoked. The beer became so popular that a road was built from a ducal brewery in Kelheim to Ingolstadt just to slake the thirsts of students at the university! It became known as the Bierstrasse (beer street).
Ending Royal Control
But just as wheat beers were reaching new heights in popularity, another phenomenon was fomenting in Bavaria and Bohemia that would revolutionize the brewing world. Better malting techniques, lager-brewing refinement, and microbiological advances were slowly making their way into mainstream brewing technology.
By the middle of the 19th century, Munich breweries were tweaking their dunkels, and Bohemia and Vienna were perfecting their pale lagers by utilizing the above-mentioned techniques. Pilsners and pale lagers quickly replaced the weissebiers as everyday quaffs among the masses. Weissebier consumption fell dramatically, and wheat beers in Germany may well have vanished were it not for the tenacity, vision and confidence of Georg Schneider.
Schneider became the tenant of the ducal brewery in Kelheim in 1855 and began producing his own wheat beers. He wrested the brewing rights to weissebier from the dunkels brewery next door in 1872 and effectively ended the royal control of wheat beers. Thanks to some aggressive production, Schneider got wheat beers back into the mainstream, and they enjoyed something of a comeback in this period.
For the next several decades, wheat beers hung tough but made up only a small fraction of all beer sold in Germany. It wasn’t until after World War II that they were rediscovered and their sales rejuvenated by the general populace.
Suddenly, and somewhat mysteriously, wheat beers have started to attract a new generation of admirers. Since the 1950s, these brews have steadily become more popular, even hip, to the point where, today, almost a quarter of all beer sold in Germany is wheat beer. Perhaps this revival is a reversion to things more natural, more traditional, or simply a rediscovery of the brewing complexity.
The same trend has sprung up in North America recently. Many microbreweries make authentic Bavarian wheat beers, and most decent multi-tap pubs have imported wheat beers in their portfolio. These days, the wheats are not hard to find.
