A lot of beer will be guzzled in Germany while the great 31-day Euros kick-about is underway – and it won’t all be lager.
Visitors to that vast country are often surprised to find – especially in Bavaria in the south – that there’s a quite different style of beer brewed alongside lager.
It’s wheat beer, which is a member of the ale family. It’s made by what is called warm fermentation, in sharp distinction to cold fermentation used to produce lager.
Wheat beer is known as both Weizenbier and simply Weisse. For centuries, it was the main type of beer consumed in Bavaria but sales went into decline with the rise of lager in the 20th century.
Then the young “green generation” in the 1970s and 80s discovered wheat beer and thought that a drink that wasn’t pasteurised and had a natural yeast sediment must be healthier than lager.
As a result, sales of wheat beer boomed and it now accounts for 50 per cent of all the beer consumed in Bavaria.
In spite of the name, the beer is made with a blend of both barley and wheat malts. Barley is essential as it contains a high level of the enzymes that convert starch into sugar suitable for fermentation. It also has a husk that acts as a natural filter during the brewing process.
Wheat on the other hand doesn’t have a husk and on its own would become mushy and clog up vessels and pipes in the brewery.
The main contribution wheat makes to beer is its appealing pale gold colour and an aroma of spices and fruit. Clove is the dominant spice while apple and banana give fruit notes. The special yeast culture used has a pronounced hint of Juicy Fruit bubble gum.
The major producer of wheat beer in Bavaria is Erdinger. It’s a name familiar to many drinkers in Britain as the beer is promoted here by a “beer ambassador”, a certain Jürgen Klopp who recently retired as the coach of Liverpool football club.
Erdinger is a picture-postcard Bavarian town with pastel-coloured buildings and onion-domed churches. The brewery dates from 1537 and came into the hands of the Bombach family in 1935.
It’s run today by Werner Bombach who built a new brewery on a green field site on the edge of town where he has doubled production to 1.7 million hectolitres a year.
Werner and his brewing team are painstaking about the quality of the ingredients they use and they supply local farmers with seed to grow barley and wheat to the brewery’s specification.
Soft brewing water comes from a local bore hole and hops are from the vast Bavarian Hallertau region north of Munich.
Erdinger Weissbier (5.3 per cent) is the brewery’s classic product and is on sale in branches of Tesco here. Following fermentation, the beer is re-seeded with fresh yeast and then conditioned in the brewery at a warm temperature for between two and four weeks.
The finished beer has a hazy gold colour, a superb aroma and palate of banana, cloves and a hint of vanilla and light, spicy hops. The finish is quenching, fruity, full of delicious creamy malt and with a good underpinning of herbal hops.
Another major wheat beer producer is Schneider in Kelheim. The brewery was first based in Munich and made beer exclusively for the Bavarian royal family. Its bar in Munich has photos showing the brewery in flames as a result of Allied bombing in World War Two.
As my father was in the Royal Air Force at the time, I keep very quiet about my family history and hope the fact that I have a German name will save me from retribution.
Prosit!
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