05/19/2021
Hefeweisbier (also known by other names such as Hefeweiss, Weissbier, Weisbier, or Hefeweizen) is a classic German 🇩🇪 style beer served in the Munich area primarily but available outside the area also. It has simple ingredients, at least 50% of the grist (malt) is wheat, some Pilsner or Vienna malt, and possibly some Munich malted barley. The hops are simple as well, Hallertau Tradition, Hallertau Mittlefruh or another German Noble hop variety with a resulting bitterness of 10-20 IBUs. Yeast for this bier is critical, as the yeast is what helps to generate those traditional flavors of clove and banana. 🍌
The ingredients may be simple but the process is a bit complicated. 🙆♂️ It's a tedious long day with various step mashing temperatures and pauses/rests used to develop the proper precursors in the wort so the yeast can create those flavors. 👌 Our process uses a 5 step mash which requires 2-2 1/2 hours in the mash. A typical ale mash time is about one hour. Once the wort is made it is boiled and hop additions are done and then the wort is chilled and transferred to the fermenter where the yeast does it's magic ✨✨✨ (if you followed your step mash correctly!). The yeast will take the ferulic acid and convert it to 4-vinyl guaiacol (a phenol that emits the wonderful clove aroma) and also create esters such as isoamyl acetate, that banana aroma that the Hefeweis is known for. After fermenting and carbonating to a proper volume of CO2, the beer is packaged. At serving is it bright, a bit cloudy since a proper Hefeweis should have the yeast in suspension, but not effervescent with the CO2 helping to express the banana esters and the clove phenols.
The traditional glass to serve such a beer 'properly' is known as a "weiss beer glass" as shown in our photo. The poured beer should have a generous head of foam - we did all of those temperature rests to accentuate the many aspects of this beer including the protein extraction to help with foam retention and to help our superior yeast bring forth the favorable banana 🍌 clove, and a little bit of 'bubblegum' that defines this style of beer. Please enjoy our version named after our Grandfather, Wayland. Prost! 🍻🍻🍻
