What Makes for a Great Wheat Beer?
Simple concept: a great wheat beer has wheat character. Wheat makes a beer that’s a little spritzier tasting than a beer made with malted barley. In the classic German breweries, the wheat character is enhanced by a yeast that produces clove and banana aromatics, giving the beer a fuller, spicier flavor. American craft brewers who use the words “weizen” or “weiss” to describe their beers should be assumed to be emulating German practices, not the practices of some brewers who make light American ales in which wheat constitutes part of the grain bill. Big difference there. Anyway, normal gravity (12 Plato, 5 percent alcohol) is what I look for in German wheats. More details about wheat beers is elsewhere on this site. Some Summit Notes… Summit Brewing’s first beers went on sale in downtown St. Paul back in 1986. Now, 17 years later, the brewery is bigger than owner Mark Stutrud probably imagined it would ever be. The beers are enormously popular in Minnesota and neighboring states, an
