Beantown Brews: A Boston Beer Blog

The second installment of my hefeweizen homebrew review. My German hefeweizen was delicious in theory, but oh-so disappointing in practice.

Recipe:
6.6 lbs of mutton’s wheat malt (half/half wheat and barley)
3/4 ounces of tettnanger hops for the boil
one packet of WYeast – 3333 German wheat strain yeast
3/4 cup corn sugar for priming

Serving type: Bottle – stored for a month

Appearance: Pours a slightly hazy orange with a minimal white head and slight lacing.

Smell: Sweet banana and citric notes.

Taste: Smooth sweetness with banana notes up front with a slight sour clove like ending.

M: A bit sticky – low carbonation – too low for a hefe and too low to balance the stickiness. Lighter bodied.

D: Lacks the crispness of a typical hefe.Too sticky to be refreshing and drinkable.

Over all grade: C-. This could have been a fantastic beer, better than its brother the Bavarian. But we didn’t heat the priming sugar in water and it was unevenly distributed in the beer. As a consequence the beer is unevenly carbonated. Some beers are fine, some over carbonated and some are as flat as you junior prom date. And who wants to drink flat beer – especially a flat hefeweizen!

BUT! Leason learned. Thirty dollars in ingredients is well worth the expereince. We caught this is the priming bucket and, too be honest, it explains the carbonation issue in a darker beer we did a while ago. If this were not a wheat and so light, we might not have caught it.

You live, you brew, you learn.