“I feel wonderful drinking beer; in a blissful mood with joy in my heart and a happy liver.”
Sumerian poet, circa 30000 B.C., “The Secret Life of Beer! Exposed: Legends, Lore & Little Known Facts”
Beer: Schneider Weisse Tap 7 Unser Original
Made by: G. Schneider and Sohn; Kelheim, Bavaria in Germany
G. Schneider and Sohn originally brewed at Weisses Brauhaus in Munich, which remains today only as a beerhouse. The family bought a brewery in Kelheim in 1927, which became the family’s lone brewing site after 1945, according to the brewery’s website.
The brewery indicates that wheat beer could only be brewed by the Bavarian royal family 200 years ago. When King Ludwig II discontinued brewing wheat beer in 1872, he sold the brewing rights to Georg Schneider.
Georg Schneider VI continues the family’s history of brewing only wheat beer — in strict accordance with Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law — to this day. This makes G. Schneider and Sohn the oldest wheat beer brewery in Bavaria, where it has brewed without interruption since 1607, according to the brewery.
Type of beer: weisse
The late Beer Hunter, Michael Jackson, featured a somewhat lengthy passage on his website about the style.
He noted that in the south, where Bavaria is located, the style has an ABV hovering around 5 percent, a higher proportion of wheat and a “yeast that produces a tart, fruity, spicy palate, sometimes with notes of cooking apples and cloves.”
Rating: 3½ pints out of 5
Beer review: This is one of those German beers about which I’ve previously waxed poetic.
It’s the very definition of a simple beer that doesn’t really need to do much more than it does.
It weighs in at a modest 5.4 percent ABV. And with this week’s stifling weather, a simple, cold weisse beer went down remarkably easy.
The color is maybe a dark amber with a perfectly rich head.
My initial reaction was simply that Schneider Weisse is a very crisp, clean beer. It’s well crafted and in no way overpowering, yet offers a balanced full body.
I would say that it had, perhaps, a kind of earthy, grassy quality. There was very little, if anything, in the way of aftertaste and maybe, just maybe, a touch of malt.
Brewer for a Day
Fegley’s Allentown Brew Works will host its first “Be Our Brewer For a Day” festival and competition Aug. 23.
The festival kicks off next year’s, that’s right, next year’s Lehigh Valley Beer Week. The winner chosen by festival attendees will join Fegley’s brewmaster, Beau Baden, in January to brew the official Lehigh Valley Beer Week beer, dubbed LVBW2.
Lehigh Valley Beer Week is scheduled for Feb. 16-23.
Craftbeer.com can offer some tips on organizing an event and asks that everyone post their events to the website’s events calendar.
IPA Day? I’ll need to check if that’s a paid holiday …
Ed Sieger’s column of beer reviews and local beer news appears every two weeks in EXPOSED. He can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at email@example.com.