Dank & Aromatic

My first wheat beer - I imagine along with many Canadians born in the late 80s - was a Rickard's White. I was working in a pub at the time and we had to start ordering oranges because of it. We'd cut them into these big wedges (the wheel wasted too much fruit) and people would juice them into their glasses like they were spritzing a fish with lemon.

Aside

There's no good site I can link for the beer I'm talking about above - fair enough, it relied on that gimmicky slice of orange and was probably dropped as soon as its marketing budget ran out (actually - according to the LCBO it was discontinued in 2017). Even more amazing is that I couldn't find a link for the Rickard's brand. Drinking in Ontario in the noughties you'd be hard pressed to find a bar that didn't serve a pint of Rickard's Red. At the time I thought they were a brewery. Just goes to show you the compression rate of some of these macros.

The place I worked also had Big Rock's Grasshopper on tap, to which I quickly shifted for my wheat beer fix. We served it with a slice of lemon - no doubt another marketing ploy, but back then we liked it (don't get me started on Bud Light Lime).

I didn't come to fully appreciate wheat beers until I moved to Germany. I think the first time I was served a Kristallweizen I sent it back thinking it was a pilsner. Kristall wheat beers are filtered, so come out looking like a standard lager. If you want a bit of cloudy haze in your wheat beer, you should be ordering a Hefe (yeast) weizen - unfiltered for your yeasty pleasure.

Today's Cloudwater is a (double) Hopfenweisse - a modern style (though its been picked up by some more traditional brewers like Schneider) that not-so-simply invites a more significant quantity of hop into the brew. The idea is to still keep the spine of the wheat beer intact (those banana bubblegum flavours) while giving the drinker something a bit less medicinal to think about.

Cloudwater | Double Hopfenweisse

^{Alc 8.5% | Canned on 26.10.2020}

Colour

Pale amber (just) with a big head that looks like it could survive a gale force wind.

Nose

Banana candies and pine trees.

Mouth

Starts with a big NEIPA hit, but quickly shifts to the expected (but faint) medicinal banana. The finish is wonderfully dry, but the alcohol is probably a bit too present.

Poor form on my part. It is generally well accepted that wheat beers should be enjoyed young and fresh. Same goes for any hop-forward brews. So I won't put a number on something that may well be past its prime. There are some really attractive features to this beer even in its current state. The hop-to-ester shift in the mouth is really fun and the nose is quite cool. This is such a different beer to a classic German Wheat, or a less classic American Wheat. But in a good way. I'll try to speed up my fridge-to-glass time going forward.

jay