Wheat Beers

Image: Stefano Stefani

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When I was a boy, my father and I used to hike across the Amish farms in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. One day we were walking by a wheat field, and my father caught hold of a head of wheat and pulled it off the stalk. He rubbed it between his hands and let the chaff blow away; a profound, ageless moment. "Have some," he said, offering the brown, plump grains to me. I'll never forget the taste: dry and dusty at first, then suddenly nutty, sweet—and tangy.

These days, I don't just eat wheat, I drink it in the many varieties of wheat beer. I'm not the only one—American beer drinkers are waking up to wheat. Molson Coors' Blue Moon Belgian White Ale, a spiced wheat beer, headed the annual list of strong-growth beer brands released last month by retail-analysis firm Information Resources. It's a trend that hasn't been missed by other brewers: Anheuser-Busch and Miller have both launched wheat beers, the latter as part of its new Miller Lite specialty series.

Wheat beers are good all year round but seem best in warmer months. The attractive characteristics that wheat adds to beer—tanginess, a smoother mouthfeel, fluffy foam—make wheat beers great refreshers and easy drinkers. (They also make tasty marinades for chicken or pork; try pouring a bottle of witbier and a squeeze of lemon over chicken for good grilling.)

Wheat, unlike the rice or corn used in mainstream lagers, is one non-barley malt ingredient—an "adjunct," in brewing parlance—that is historically acceptable to craft brewers and beer geeks. Wheat beers are often the first crossover craft beer for mainstream beer drinkers. The reasons aren't all in the kernel, but that's where they start.

When I chewed those wheat kernels, what happened in my mouth is exactly what happens when malt gets cooked, or "mashed," at a brewery. The enzymes in my mouth broke the starches in the wheat into sugars, just as enzymes break down the starches in the mash. If you're stirring the mash, you can feel that happen. One moment you're forcing your way through lumpy oatmeal, and the next, the paddle is slipping through a syrupy soup.

When the enzymes work on malted barley, though, you get only sweetness—none of the tanginess you get from wheat. "Even though the pH of wheat beer comes out about the same as all-malt beer," said Ron Barchet, brewmaster at Victory Brewing in Downingtown, Pennsylvania (not far from where my father and I hiked), "there's an acid release during the mash that carries through to the beer and gives that flavor."

Barchet mentioned that most beers traditionally made with wheat—hefeweizen, Berliner Weisse, witbier, Kölsch—have relatively high carbonation, which can give a perception of a light acidity as well. That was when I started to realize that it's not only the wheat which makes the difference, it's what the brewer does with it—producing a great wheat beer means designing it to make the most of what wheat has to offer.

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