Hopfenweiss

One of the beers I picked up on Saturday was a beer I'd been after for far longer than I should. It's a sad tale caused my own stupidity.

Some time ago I read about Brooklyn Brewery and Schneider & Sohn teaming up to make hoppy weiss beer. Normally wheat beers have a low hopping rate so I was interested to see what cranking it up did. I've kept my eyes open for the beer when in specialist beer shops but all I ever found was a 8.2% ABV weizenbock version. Changing the amount of hops and the strength of the beer was a variable too far for me so on each occasion I passed the opportunity to buy it and I continued my search.

And so the months went by. Eventually it dawned on me that there could be a reason I'd found the weizenbock on a number of occasions but never a normal strength version so I got googling. It didn't take much to find out that in fact the hoppy wheat beer was indeed the weizenbock and there was never a normal strength version. It was enough to make me sing the Siamese national anthem.

As to how the beer tastes, it was good. You can taste the wheat beer base, with the extra hops balanced and a good floral addition to the flavour. Bitterness still seemed low so I guess a lot of the hops were added late. On the down side it was a bit soapy and with the added taking it up to 8.2% ABV has definitely made it too sweet. They really should do a normal strength version of this!