Hefeweizen, the Bavarian wheat beer

Hefeweizen is the cloudy, top-fermented wheat beer of Bavaria: pale gold, crowned with a thick white foam, and full of aromas that remind many drinkers of banana and clove. The name joins the German words for yeast and wheat, and in Munich you will mostly hear it called Weißbier. This guide explains what makes a Hefeweizen, how a royal monopoly shaped its history, how it is served in Bavaria and why the slice of lemon stays in the kitchen.

What is Hefeweizen?

Hefeweizen, Weizenbier and Weißbier (often spelled Weissbier in English) are, for practical purposes, three names for the same family of beers. According to the Oxford Companion to Beer, German law requires a beer sold under these names to be brewed with at least half malted wheat; most of them actually use around 60 to 70 percent, with malted barley making up the rest. Weißbier means white beer, a name that points to the pale, yellowish tint the wheat gives the glass.

Two things set the style apart from the lagers that dominate Bavarian taps. First, it is top-fermented with special wheat beer yeasts, which makes it one of the few ales in a region known as the cradle of lager brewing. Second, those yeasts create the signature aroma: fruity notes often described as banana and spicy, phenolic notes compared to clove or nutmeg. Hops stay in the background, carbonation runs high, and the beer is usually left unfiltered, which explains the haze. The filtered, brilliantly clear version is called Kristallweizen; a version made with dark malts is a Dunkles Weißbier.

So a typical Hefeweizen is roughly as strong as a regular Munich lager, sometimes a little stronger. More about how it compares with Helles, Dunkel or Bock is on German beer types.

Hefeweizen history: a beer that belonged to the dukes

For centuries, brewing wheat beer in Bavaria was not a trade but a privilege. The Oxford Companion to Beer describes how the noble Degenberg family obtained a wheat beer privilege; the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns dates the ducal charter to 1548. When their line died out in 1602, the right fell back to the ruling house, and Duke Maximilian I turned it into a lucrative monopoly for himself and his heirs. In 1607 he moved his ducal wheat beer brewery to the Platzl in Munich, according to Hofbräu exactly where the Hofbräuhaus stands today.

The monopoly lasted about two centuries. By the late 18th century wheat beer had gone out of fashion, and the better lagers of the 19th century pushed it further to the margins. Schneider Weisse tells the turning point this way: Georg I. Schneider negotiated with the royal brewing office for the old wheat beer right and became the first commoner allowed to brew it. In September 1872 he began brewing his own wheat beer in Munich. The BJCP style guide dates modern Weissbier to that year; Schneider's beer was amber, and the pale version most people know today only caught on from the 1960s.

The comeback was dramatic. The Oxford Companion notes that wheat beer sales had dropped below 3 percent of Bavarian production in the 1950s and early 1960s, then rebounded from about 1965, until wheat beer held more than a third of the Bavarian market at the time of writing (2012). The full family story is told on the German page about Schneider Weisse.

How to serve Hefeweizen

Wheat beer has its own glass: tall, heavy at the base, narrow in the middle and flared at the top. The shape is there for the foam, which builds up quickly because wheat beer is rich in protein and carbonation. A bottle is poured carefully to build a fine, dense foam; with a last bit of beer left in the bottle, the bottle is swirled to lift the yeast from the bottom, and that cloudy rest goes in last.

Freshness matters. The BJCP guidelines point out that the style is best young, because it rarely improves with age. Traditionally, wheat beer is refermented in the bottle, although the Oxford Companion notes that true bottle conditioning has become rare among the large brands; Schneider, for example, describes its Original as openly fermented, bottle conditioned, unfiltered and unpasteurized.

Hefeweizen in Munich today

In Bavaria, wheat beer belongs to the late morning. The Oxford Companion calls a glass of it an integral part of the Brotzeit, the mid-morning snack, and the classic Weisswurst with sweet mustard and a pretzel is traditionally eaten with a wheat beer. In the beer garden, a wheat beer mixed with lemon soda is called a Russ, the wheat beer cousin of the Radler.

A word for American beer fans: the Oxford Companion criticizes beers sold as hefeweizen in the US that are fermented with ordinary ale or lager yeast. Without the special wheat beer yeast, they lack the banana and clove profile that defines the Bavarian original. At the Oktoberfest itself, only the six Munich breweries may pour; their festival beers are covered on Oktoberfest beer, and the festival overview is on Oktoberfest.

A half liter (about 17 US fluid ounces) of Hefeweizen contains about as much alcohol as a regular lager, so it deserves the same moderation, especially before noon. German readers find the Bavarian beer styles compared on Bayerische Biersorten.