Kellerweiss

Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
Chico, CA

Available: nationwide

This Bavarian-style hefeweizen, Sierra Nevada’s second addition to their year-round portfolio this year, is brewed with a hefeweizen yeast strain unknown in this country.

ABV: 4.8
ABW: 3.8
Color: golden
Bitterness: 15
Original gravity: 1051

This beer is sunshine in a glass. It pours like a summer morning, hazy and light golden-yellow with a bit of a fizz that hints of good things to come. The white head dissipates into a light skiff, giving you a peek at the warm, golden-hued nectar beneath. True Bavarian wheat aromas dance out of the glass — spicy and fruity, yet so tightly woven together it’s hard to tell when one note ends and another begins. Someone should make a perfume that smells like this. The flavors at first sip are just the same — an intense tango of tart lemon, wheat spice, slight banana and clove in a perfect balance. No flavor really stands out, and yet all of them take center stage in this well-crafted beer.
- Lisa Morrison

You know exactly what you’re going to get with this cloudy golden beer from the moment you lift the cap. The aroma almost bounces out of the bottle, offering huge banana and pear fruitiness with a bubblegum accent. The only thing I can fault about the taste is that it may simply be too obvious for a weissbier, loaded, as it is, with pear, creamy banana and an apple-like sharpness, with Bazooka Joe aromatics on top and a faint clove-like bitterness in behind. The cloves then stack up in the chewy, bittersweet finish while sweet fruit lingers. Tasty, fresh and full.
- Jeff Evans

Lisa Morrison
Morrison, aka the Beer Goddess, writes about beer whenever and wherever she can and also gets to talk about it on a weekly radio show in her hometown of Portland, OR.

Jeff Evans
Author of the Good Bottled Beer Guide and The Book of Beer Knowledge, Jeff Evans is an eight-time editor of the CAMRA Good Beer Guide and one of Britain's best-known beer writers.

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