Bavarian Wheat BEERS: Mastering Weissbier brewing techniques and tradition

Whilst these days brewers big and small across the globe have fun brewing ‘wheat beers’, traditionally brews with a grist containing a significant quantity of wheat grains are associated with Belgium or Bavaria. Why should that be?

Belgian wheat beers, usually referred to as white beers - Wit, or Witte beers – tend to contain around 30% wheat in the grist and frequently this wheat is un-malted relying on the diastatic power of the remaining barley malt in the grist to convert the unmodified wheat starch into usefully fermentable sugars.

Belgian wheat beers also tend to derive their pronounced aroma profiles because of the deliberate addition of specific spices, typically coriander and curacao, whilst the ‘white’ turbidity comes from high levels of protein extracted from the wheat.

By contrast Bavarian beers, the central topic of this article (we shall look at Belgian wheat beers on another occasion), rely to a much greater extent on the particular yeast strains selected, working with the wheat portion of the grist bill, to give beers their characteristic aroma and flavour profile as well as the tight, creamy, foamy heads that leaves non-wheat beer brewers green with envy. Turbidity is also more likely to have a suspended yeast component.

A LITTLE OF HISTORY

All Bavarian beers are, naturally, subject to the provisions of the famous beer purity law, the Reinheitsgebot. This decree, issued on April 23^rd 1516 by the Bavarian Duke Wilhelm IV at the Assembly of Estate of Ingolstadt, stated that the Duke would be awfully happy if in future “no other items be used for beer than barley, hops and water.”

Whilst the Reinheitsgebot no longer carries the weight of law, no self-respecting German brewer would suffer the shame of breaking it (OK, so these days funky German craft brewers take a more Belgian view of the world), so Bavarian brewers are obliged to brew with malted wheat. Consequently, the brewer is not relying on the same extent on the enzymes present in malted barley to make the wheat starch available to brewing yeasts – although wheat does lack amylases. As a result, a much higher proportion of the grist can be comprised of wheat; often up to around 60%. Indeed, to be called a Weissbier a beer must contain at least 50% wheat malt (and be brewed with top-fermenting yeast).

Higher than 60% wheat content in the malt bill is rare, for the simple reason that wheat grains have no husk, and it is the presence of barley husks in the mash that produces a porous filter bed without which the lautering process could not take place.

If you are fortunate enough never to have witnessed a stuck mash and want to know what one looks like, try and brew with a 100% wheat grist. Though, for those of you not pathologically curious to the point of having a diagnosable personality disorder, some very kind people have written textbooks to save you having to find out the hard way.

So why Bavaria especially? The famous American historian Solomon Katz believed that human beings ceased being hunter-gatherers and became sedentary agriculturalists in order to grow grain to make beer, and the evidence of the residues from early pottery shards dating to some 3,400 BCE show that our first brewing ancestors, also used early wheat forms - emmer, einkorn and spelt – in the grist.

Now it may come as a shock to Bavarians, but the cradle of civilisation was not just north of the Alps, but rather between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, so why do we think of wheat beer as especially Southern German? In part it is because the Bavarian’s have an expression, ‘Bier ist Brot’, ‘Beer is bread’. The English, for example, don’t have that expression, because during the Middle Ages they took the view that beer definitely wasn’t bread, or in other words, bread made out of barley was not nearly as nearly as good as bread made from wheat. Whilst in the C13^th English Assizes regulated the price of ale against the price of wheat, barley and oats, the price of bread was fixed against wheat alone.

In other words, wheat was too much in demand to make bread, so that, over time, it was regarded as wasteful to use it to make beer. It seems that in other parts of Europe the same prohibitions came into force over time. In Bavaria alone the use of wheat for brewing persisted as a result of an early piece of intellectual property law.

Duke Wilhelm IV, of Reinhietsgebot fame, was a member of Bavaria’s ruling house, the Wittelsbachs. So, having made sure that his beer was wonderfully pure, Duke Wilhelm IV then gave, sold, or bartered the perpetual rights to brew with wheat to the Degenberg family of Schwarzach in either 1520 or 1548, depending upon which book you read.

Because of its associations with the Bavarian ruling family wheat beer brewing became to be seen as ostentatious, for the same reasons as it was seen as wasteful elsewhere. Brewing beer with valuable bread wheat was the equivalent of lighting a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill. Wheat beer brewing and drinking became a status symbol and therefore attractive to anyone aspiring to climb socially. Wheat beer acquired a social cachet. The Degenbergs , it would seem, understood this. The Wittelbachs didn’t.

Regrettably for the Bavian Dukes, the Degenbergs proved to be rather better at wheat beer brewing that the Wittelbachs anticipated, with the result that worrying quantities of wheat were diverted from bakers ovens to brewers kettles, and the Degenbergs became very early members of the nouveau riche, prompting a surly Duke Albrecht V to prohibit the brewing the ‘useless drink’ wheat beer by anyone. By anyone except the Degenbergs, that is, who unlike the Wittelbachs, presumably had lawyers who knew what perpetuity actually meant.

Happily, for the Wittelbachs, in 1602 the Degenbergs ran out of male heirs and Duke Maximiliam promptly decided that this ‘useless drink’ could only brewed by his family and, indeed, quickly decided that wheat beer was so ‘useless’ that every innkeeper in Bavaria had to sell wheat beer from establishments owned by himself and his descendants. This monopoly lasted until 1798 when their absolute rights were disposed of and others could now brew with wheat.

This was no act of charity. The fact was that the Wittelsbach monopoly was no longer worth much as wheat beers were out of fashion and their popularity continued to decline as English brewing techniques and technology were enabling Bavarian brewers to make lagers of increasing quality and desirability.

The residual Wittlesbach monopoly came to an end in 1872 when they finally sold their brewing rights to a determined brewer named Georg Schneider, who, since 1855, had been leasing the original Weisses Brauhaus built by Duke Maximilian I in 1607 in Kelheim some 70 miles (110km) northeast of Munich. Not everyone shared Schnieder’s faith in weiss bier and volumes continued decline until the 1960’s when the style was rediscovered; the Schneider Brewery having kept the flame alive for 100 years, and without whom this great beer style would have been lost to the world. Happily, the Schneider Brewery is still in family hands. Today it is run by Georg Schneider VI with young Georg Schneider VII waiting in the wings.

BREWING WEISSEBIER

Brewing with wheat brings specific difficulties. The best quality barley varieties are bred and cultivated to be malted and turned into beer, becoming animal feed if they do not, or cannot reach the required standards. Wheat, however, is grown to make bread the quantities required for Weiss beer brewing are so tiny there are no brewing wheat varieties. Brewers therefore must brew with wheat that is bred and developed with bread-making characteristics in mind.

This means that the protein, gluten and, therefore, wort viscosity properties of wheat beer brews will be radically different to barley only worts. This will affect brewhouse design, mashing regimes, fermentation profiles, and, above all, yeast selection parameters.

High wheat levels have a number of effects on the finished product. The different amino acid composition of wheat to barley produces different esters, and brewers can manipulate this to achieve the organoleptic profile they are aiming to achieve. For example, AEB’s FERMOALE Weiss will, if fermented at higher temperatures, produce more of the characteristic banana esters. Lower temperatures favour production of the 4-vinyl guaiacol that gives certain of these beers their clove-like personalities.

The top-fermenting nature of Weissbiers also has implications. Firstly, in a country dominated by bottom fermented lagers, it meant that, until the craft beer revolution, with it’s ‘let’s all brew everything at once’ attitude, Weissbeir brewing tended to be the province of specialist Weissbier brewers, of which Schneider is still the primus inter pares. This meant that Weissbier brewing expertise tended to be quite concentrated, and to an extent it had to be, because this is a notoriously difficult beer style to brew – or range of styles to be more accurate. Not for nothing do German brewers jokingly curse, “Weissbier, scheissbier!”

The greater volatility of top-fermentation, plus the added vagaries of wheat and the temperament of wheat beer yeasts means that the propensity for things to suddenly spiral out of control is greater than with other beer styles. The craft brewer who has tried a red ale, one week, a milk stout the next, and think to themselves, ‘I know, I’ll get a Weissbier recipe and give that a go’, may well come unstuck, and be left staring at a glass of something flat, cloudy and generally unappealing.

Not all brewing equipment is suited to Weissbier brewing. For example, experience suggests that Weissbier yeasts perform best in open fermenters, which provides an added layer of ester complexity, and a visit to a wheat beer brewery fermenting room is easily one of the most intensely aromatic experience to had in all the world of food, akin to standing in a banana ripening warehouse.

If a closed fermenter or uni-tank is not the optimal vessel for fermentation, it’s not the best for conditioning either. The best Weissbier, after a short, closed vessel maturation period, are conditioned in bottle after an addition of extra ‘speise’ – wort – to prompt a secondary fermentation, either with the original yeast or an alternative lager strain. Aside from fresher flavours the bottle-conditioning also gives the finished beers their characteristically high levels of carbonation, forming the tall, whipped meringue head that looks so appealing atop a tall, slender Weissbier glass.

Having said that, many breweries do produce modern Seissbiers using closed fermenters and even pasteurisation, so not having the specialist’s equipment is no reason for not brewing the style. It is maybe a reason for taking a little extra thought and care when planning production. Here AEB Brewing can help, for it is the technical support that the AEB Group offers to its customers, alongside their comprehensive range of brewing products, that is the basis of our reputation.

AEB Brewing’s technical support staff can advise you on the ideal pitching rate, oxygenation levels, fermentation temperature, wort gravity and all the other parameters you need to consider when deciding on the flavour characteristics and aroma profile of your Weissbier. They can tell you what adjustments you will need to consider should you wish to make a Dunkel Weizen, a Weisen doppelbock, or the low alcohol leichtes weisbbier style which is currently very much in hype.

In addition, we can advise you on protein turbidity and yeast flocculation, which can sometimes work against each other as haze proteins collect on and drop yeast cells out of suspension. There is always an additional factor to consider in wheat beer production. By the way, please take care over terminology. Weiss is German for white, and Weizen is wheat. Frequently used interchangeably they are not entirely synonymous.

Traditionally a Hefeweizen - literally yeast-wheat beer – is an accompaniment to weisswurst, the white coloured Bavarian veal and pork sausages. These are made freshly daily and eaten in vast quantities with sweet honey mustard. However, they are regarded as past their best if eaten after midday, but this is not to say that hefeweizen is purely a breakfast beer.

To find out more visit FERMOALE Weiss or contact our technical and sales team will be delighted to answer your queries.

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Bavarian Wheat BEERS: Mastering Weissbier brewing techniques and tradition

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