Lots of Wheat
The beginning of my first bottle of Leinenkugel's Sunset Wheat was inauspicious. I twisted off the cap neatly and easily . . . got out my glass . . . poured most of the bottle into the glass . . . and slopped quite a bit over the side, moving the glass from one hand to the other, so that I was occupied for the next five or ten minutes cleaning things onto which it had spilled. "It smells like beer," onyxblue1 said, walking into the kitchen. "No," I told her, "it smells like spilled beer." When it was cleaned up and I was sitting here with the first sentence typed, I was called away to assist in a crisis involving the discovery of a cat who had been trapped in a bedroom closet for ten or twelve hours. But when I finally got to sit down again, I was pleased to find that I had a good beer waiting for me. It's very cloudy. Very cloudy. It looks like apple cider - not the clear stuff they pass off at the grocery store, but the thick, sediment-filled stuff you get at the orchards in October. It smells very sweet, like a honey beer, and the flavor is very un-beery. Since I like a beer to taste like beer, this is not necessarily a good thing, but the flavor was still pleasant. It's kind of like some sort of tropical fruit-flavored malt beverage instead of a proper beer. Maybe a pineapple-passion fruit-banana sort of thing. The label calls it a "beer with natural flavors." I will have to find out what they mean by "natural flavors."
Then there's their Summer Shandy, a beverage that bears no resemblance to any shandy I ever had in a London pub. It smells like a cross between ReaLemon and bread crumbs, and it looks rather like ReaLemon does when it goes bad* - cloudy and yellowish-brown, like a cheap pine board when it gets wet. The flavor is very lemony. Very, very lemony. So very lemony that the beer used as the base is immaterial. It could be Harp, it could be Scrimshaw, it could be Coors . . . but I suspect it's actually a Leinenkugel's brew with horrifying levels of lemon flavoring added. So, sorry bateleur, but while this was unsatisfying, it was not the truly terrible beer you've been hoping I'd find.
Sprecher Brewing Co. was founded when I was in high school. That lack of experience doesn't keep them from producing a good beer. Their hefe weiss "coarse-filtered wheat ale," in hefty 16 oz. bottles, smells like a cross between a box of mixed chocolates and a heavily hay-strewn barnyard. The slightly spicy flavor, pleasantly light on the hops, does not, I should emphasize, taste anything like I imagine a barnyard tastes. I highly recommend it.
R.J. King's Wingwalker Summer Honey Wheat (are we seeing a pattern here?) is beer. It says it is an unfiltered wheat beer brewed with honey. I really don't care what it says, though. It's beer. American beer. It lacks the cloudiness I expect from unfiltered beers. It lacks the sweetness I expect from honey beers. It lacks the maltiness I expect from "lightly hopped" beers. It doesn't even have that "Wisconsin beer" flavor I have mentioned, even though it is a Wisconsin beer. What does it have? A cool label. Really - besides the drawing of three guys forming a human pyramid on top of a flying biplane, the paper is cool - a very porous, pulpy sort of paper that melts off the bottle if you're not careful (as a warning to fellow collectors). What else? Strange tastes. Olives are the first I notice, and while I did have a martini a few hours ago, I've had many things since then I can't taste in this beer. There may be a bit of a guava-y taste, but that might be me trying too hard to find something else to say about this beer.
I thought Anchor Brewing Co.'s Anchor Summer Beer might be the disaster to which bateleur has been looking forward. I have had Anchor Steam - like many science fiction fans, I expect, because it was mentioned in Callahan's Crosstime Saloon - and to say that I was unimpressed would be polite. It falls somewhere between Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada in my spectrum of like and dislike. So I picked this up off of the table where my favorite liquor store puts the survivors of dropped six-packs and such, figuring I would do something to keep bateleur happy. I poured this very clear, bright, golden wheat beer with a very spicy-floral scent with a shaking hand. That saved me having to try it for a minute, while I cleaned up the drips and wiped the bottom and side of the glass. Then I talked to onyxblue1 about how uncloudy it was; at least, unlike the Wingwalker, it did not claim to be unfiltered. That saved me having to try it for another minute. Finally, though, I could not put it off any longer. So I tried it. Sorry, bateleur, but this isn't it. I actually like this one more than Anchor Steam, and it has raised my opinion of Anchor Brewing considerably. I doubt I'll be going out of my way to buy it again, but as far as wheat beers go, it is fairly light and "crisp" . . . I think that's the word . . . and it's such a close call that I will not suggest avoiding it.
Another off of the Lundeen's clearance table was Goose Island's Pere Jacques Belgian style ale. After the imagined horrors of the Anchor Summer Beer, what did I have to fear? So I opened this beer with a label like you might expect to find on a good single-malt whisky. I wiped the condensation from the glass (we were hovering around 75% humidity at the time) and held it up to the light. "It's a very pretty color," onyxblue1 said. It's a transparent sort of thing, somewhere in the family of roan and chestnut. "It smells like candy," I said. It's a bit like the smell when you take the lid off of a candy store's jar of ribbon candy. Then I tasted it. The candy premonition was not far off. The flavor is very syrupy and sweet, and I doubt I could drink more than a bottle at a sitting. The alcohol content is 9%, which is rather high for a single fermentation, but that isn't why. No, it's the sweetness. The sweetness is so overwhelming (with a small caramelized/burnt aftertaste) that it's almost like drinking 12 oz. of melted liqueur-filled chocolates. This 2007 brewing is supposed to improve with age, however, so perhaps if I pick up another bottle and squirrel it away for five years, my opinion will be different.
I had to try something from Unibroue, of course. This time, it was Seigneuriale. The weather has been pretty bad lately, so condensation is thick on the glass as soon as the beer is in it, but after much wiping, I'd say Seigneuriale looks like a red ale or a cloudy iced tea . . . with bubbles. It smells like apples, with a bit of something salty or spicy that I can't quite identify. That something comes through very strongly in the flavor; it's like nutmeg, and ginger, and maybe black pepper or allspice. Overall, I'd say you† wouldn't like it, so I'll be selfless and save you from it by drinking all of it. I'll let you know where to send it, if you like.
Wandering through the beer section of the supermarket and allowed to pick something beyond the regular ration of cheap beer, I was about to pick nothing, since that's what caught my eye . . . until I saw Sparks (note the cute battery-like design). It's not really a beer; it's a "premium malt beverage with caffeine citric acid blend, taurine, guarana ginseng blend, natural flavors, certified color & FD&C yellow number five," which hardly meets German purity standards. The first thing I thought when I poured it and saw how orange it was was, "Oh no! I've desecrated my beer glass!" It is very clear and very orange, and not very carbonated. It smells like candy and tastes like orange soda. I spent a long, long time laughing while I drank this . . . orange thing. It's a very silly drink, and I could see me getting it again‡ occasionally, although it's so sweet it makes my teeth feel soft.
After the orange malt beverage and the slew of wheat beers, I needed something different. Harbin is very prettily packaged, and I think I might have to get a second bottle just so I can keep one in the paper sleeve and one out of the sleeve. It's a clear, golden lager with a mild version of the flavor I tend to associate with beers from Indochina or central Canada - that is, there's a bit of that skunk-in-the-road smell to it, and the flavor is not overly hopsy. Unlike mild but distinctly Canadian beers it brings to mind, such as Molson Special Export Ale, which is similarly mild, or the more strongly flavored Singha, Harbin has a very gentle aftertaste like a warm cup of very good Darjeeling - which is strange, since it's from the wrong end of China to be anywhere near that bit of India.
*Yes, I do know. I don't want to talk about it.
†Yes, you.
‡I have.