On a crisp Bavarian day 7 years ago, after a lunch consisting entirely of sausage, I encountered a very unusual beer. In the little town of Kelheim, about sixty miles from the Czech border, Brewmaster Hans-Peter Drexler was leading importers through a tasting of G. Schneider & Sohn weissbiers. Schneider is among the most traditional breweries in the world and makes nothing other than wheat ales—no helles, no dunkel, no märzen lagers. Bavarians have been making wheat beers a very long time, however, and the variations available offered quite a menu of possibilities—a point Drexler drove home when he handed us glasses of a strong liquid the color of a hazelnut shell smelling of warm bread, chocolate, and ripe banana.
Aventinus is the brewery’s weizenbock, the most-lauded in the world, and it is uncommon by any standard. Unlike the drier lagered bockbiers that proliferate seasonally in Bavaria, Aventinus is made with the traditional weizen yeast strain, which gives it a sweet and decadent palate. The familiar yeast-driven flavors of banana and clove are present, but they’re more concentrated while also being more peripheral; the body and booze of the beer crowd them with waves of chocolate, toffee, and candied fruit, all warmed by alcohol and enclosed in folds of velvet. In the world of beer, and certainly German beer, weizenbocks are strange unexpected beers.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Though tall sexy glasses of opaque (and hazy long before hazy was cool) ales are the very picture of a Bavarian biergarten, their ubiquity conceals a deeper truth: all Bavarian weissbiers are really strange beers. Weizenbock may be the oddball of the family, but it’s the distance between The Addams Family’s Morticia and Pugsley, not Morticia and Leave it to Beaver’s Beaver Cleaver. In a traditional brewery such as Schneider, nearly every step in the process has unique elements that distinguish it from breweries everywhere else in the world. Bavarian weissbiers may not be quite as exotic as lambics or Scandinavian farmhouse ales, but they’re not far off.