Not bad wheat beer, bit more spice than I'm used to but smooth.

Aroma 4. Appearance 5. Taste 7. Palate 2. Overall 12. Good overall beer, maybe a too short aftertaste.

Bottle from Total Wine in Fredericksburg. Pours mostly clear golden with a dusting of a white head. Aroma is wheat, sweat, banana. Flavor is sweet grasses, light banana, wheat, a little yeast. Plain. Fine.

Sampled from 0.355 l bottle. Hazy, straw yellow with a foamy, white head. Sweetish, moderately fruity and yeasty-spicy aroma of banana, cloves, citrus and pear. Moderately sweet, yeasty-spicy and slightly fruity taste of banana, cloves, pear and a touch of citrus, followed by a medium long, moderately yeasty-spicy, slightly dry and minimally sourish finish. Medium body, smooth and moderately effervescent mouthfeel, average carbonation. Nice Weizen!

Bottle from Total Wine & More, St Petersburg. Mid-gold, hazy with a tiny uneven film of white head. Dough, lemon/orange, clove, coriander, vanilla and a hint of ginger. Sweet herbal taste, fairly typical of a good Hefe, but here is more of a bright citrussy hop note than would normally be expected. Sweet/astringent wheaty and lemony finish. Thin body for the style, and carbonated to high heaven. Pretty darn good.

Bottle 33 cl. Yellow, hazy with a medium white foamy head. Wheat aroma, spices and some banana. Light sweet, light bitter with a soft wheat end.

The American craft beer revolution originally drew on old English traditions more than anything else but a German influence also crept in at an early stage, and this is one of the ’classic’ American interpretations of the Bavarian Weissbier style. Medium thick, egg-white, creamy head leaving a dense rim around the glass and a thin veil in the middle, but certainly a lot less frothy than I am used to in this particular beer type; immediately and equally cloudy straw blonde robe with slight ochre-ish hue. Aroma of ripe banana, apple peel, some biscuit, white bread crumbs, dried orange peel, old cloves, white pepper, vanilla sugar somewhere, straw, pear juice, sweet (unpickled) gherkin, sweetbread, melting butter, raw turnip, field flowers, artisanal honey, candied pineapple. Crisp, fruity onset, lots of the expected banana ester (isoamylacetate), sweet, paired with balancing green plum-, starfruit- and unripe kiwi-like sourishness, refreshing with spritzy, minerally carbonation slightly coarsening an otherwise smooth, ’fluffy’ mouthfeel. Pleasantly soft bready and biscuity barley sweetness in the middle with utterly soapy and very gently souring wheat, carrying the banana and other fruit flavors onwards to the finish, meeting with an earthy yeastiness and soft hayish hop bitterish touch as well as aromatic phenols - quite strongly so, but still feeling ’natural’ and actually quite enjoyable. Banana flavor lingers a bit along with the biscuity malts and softly sourish, very soapy ’wheatiness’. Authentic Bavarian Hefeweizen can be a real treat if fresh enough and served properly and many attempts at this ancient style that have been made out of its historical region seem to lack finesse and balance, often ending up as a one-sidedly banana-drenched caricature of the style. This one, however, understands the refinement, balance and subtlety of it: it is very heavy in the cliché banana flavor of the style, but also adds the spicy phenols that are indispensable for the overall balance; its mouthfeel and overall personality well match the German standard. The only thing lacking a bit for me, is a lush, whipped cream-like head formation, normally established by the wheat, and indeed it seems the wheat factor is a little bit understated here. Apart from that, I can imagine this being an introduction to Weissbier for many young American consumers, and having tasted dozens of German examples, I can only confirm that this is a credible, genuine and very useful beer to get acquainted with the style- though I also think it is a bit overrated here as a result of the American prevalence in its ratings. Sierra Nevada, one of the US pioneers in craft brewing, has done many influential things for the craft beer movement in the New World and it’s good to revisit them every now and then.

How: Bottle.
Where: Viking Line.
Appearance: Hazy dark golden colour with a white head.
Aroma: Wheat, citrus, yeast, banana.
Body: Light to medium body, medium carbonation.
Flavour: Wheat, citrus, spices, yeast, banana, some fruit.