Hans-Peter Drexler

Another sign of beer change in Germany

Look closely at the label for TAPX “Mein Nelson Sauvin” from Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn. Those are hops. And the hops that make TAPX something different aren’t from Germany, but from New Zealand.

In this video Schneider produced to promote the new beer, available in limited quantities in the U.S. (my local store got six of the 750ml bottles), brewmaster Han-Peter Drexler says what’s been mentioned here before. That the Reinheitsgebot needn’t limit German brewers and that change happens slowly when it comes to beer in Germany. If you haven’t clicked on the video yet, go ahead, and at least hang around to get a look at the open fermentation vessels at Schneider. In Brewing With Wheat I try to describe what it’s like to stand in the midst of those tanks.

On his left yeast climbs high in a tank full of wort on its way to being the strong wheat doppelbock called Aventinus. On his right fermentation only recently started on what will be a batch of Schneider Original. A small hole opens in the middle of the yeast blanket, briefly revealing the wort below before closing again. It is alive.

Now you can see for yourself.

As the beer’s name suggests, the hop star is Nelson Sauvin, a cultivar noteworthy because of compounds1 that give it exotic fruit-like and white wine-like flavors; a grapefruit and rhubarb aroma akin to sauvignon blanc wine.

In the video, Drexler is already talking about next year, the next beer. His boss, Georg Schneider IV, is a sixth generation owner and properly respectful of tradition. He’s also committed to change. “The German beer market is deadly boring,” he told Sylvia Kopp in 2008, for a story that appeared in All About Beer magazine. “It is all very much the same. The tendency towards sameness is encouraged, for example, by our domestic beer tests rating beer only by its typicality and flawlessness. Creativity is only acted on in the beer mix category.”

This was about the time his brewery did the collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery called Schneider & Brooklyner Hopfen-Weisse. Most of that first batch was shipped to the United States, with only 200 cases reserved for Germany. When we were in Kelheim that fall there was no Hopfen-Weisse to be found. Now when you visit the brewery restaurant you can order the beer. Small change, but a change.

“If you brew a beer that not everybody likes, you have the wonderful effect that people talk about it,” Schneider said in 2008. And Drexler added, “We’ve got to take people by the hand and lead them to new worlds of taste. Customers, as well as chefs, culinary staff and traders, are searching for innovations.”

The video concludes with Drexler laughing as he explains that TAPX creates a platform for something new every year. He obviously enjoys the thought. Perhaps not in 2012, but surely soon, he won’t have to look beyond Germany for a hop with aromas and flavors previously considered exotic and unhop-like (or should it be un-hop-like or unhoppy? – whatever tells you this isn’t what brewers meant by “hoppy” just a few years ago).

Brewers attending the giant industry trade show Brau Beviale 2011 in Nuremberg earlier this month got a chance to rub and sniff several new hop varieties being developed at the Hop Research Center in Hüll. These cultivars are just ready for their first brewing trials and have many more tests to pass in the field before they end up in any commercially brewed beer. They don’t even have names beyond their designation within the breeding program; for instance 2007/018/013 tastes of tangerine and 2009/001/718 of watermelon, with grapefruit-like notes and also the impression of honey.

It’s going to be hard for the German beer market to remain “deadly boring” with hops like these.

1 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentan-1-ol and 3-sulfanyl-4-methylpentyl acetate for those of you scoring at home.

Weiss beers and tradition

In one of its periodic forays into beer, a New York Times tasting panel tackled American-brewed wheat beers, looking primarily for the best “American versions of Bavarian-style brews.”

This can be a bit confusing.

As we expected, the American wheat beers were all over the map, with brewers taking great liberties with the style. This caused no small amount of consternation among the panel, particularly with those beers that styled themselves hefeweizen. Magic Hat Circus Boy, for example, calls itself a hefeweizen, yet it has a floral aroma that is wholly uncharacteristic of the style. Widmer Hefeweizen, which the panel rejected, was another beer that bore little relation to the style.

“You’re trading on the good name of an actual, established style to sell something that’s different,” (panelist Garrett) Oliver said, likening such uses of the term hefeweizen to labeling American white wines as Chablis. “It’s confusing and frustrating.”

As a quick point of order, American Hefeweizen has become pretty well recognized – with its own category at the Great American Beer Festival – as a separate style, with beers from Widmer and Pyramid labeled “hefeweizen” considered benchmarks.

The beer rated tops by the panel was Brooklyn Brewery’s Brooklyner Weisse, where Oliver brews. He’s a frequent participant on these panels and Eric Asimov writes “Mr. Oliver didn’t identify it as his own beer, but was unembarrassed by the panel’s unanimous approval.”

This certainly doesn’t call to question the validity of the results, because the tasting was “blind” and Brooklyner Weisse is an outstanding beer. In-Heat Wheat from Flying Dog in Colorado (a beer that has its own reserved spot in our fridge), Samuel Adams Hefeweizen and Magic Hat Hocus Pocus ranked just a notch lower.

The panel also tasted a few German versions – although they didn’t know that during the blind tasting and those were not rated with the others. One, from Erdinger, did not make the cut, but the other two, from Schneider and Franziskaner, “might well have been our top beers of the tasting.”

Since the discussion here often turns to the importance of tradition in brewing, it is interesting to see that the way brewers of Schneider (G. Schneider & Sohn) and Franziskaner (Spaten, owned by InBev) produce weiss beers has changed.

Schneider leans heavily on tradition – George I founded the brewery in 1872 and according to the company’s website the first words from George VII (born in 1995) were “Schneider Weisse” – and that extends into the brewhouse.

Schneider still employs a decoction mash (where part of the mash is removed, boiled and returned to the original mash), but five years ago Spaten abandoned the traditional method and now uses a single infusion mash. Spaten also uses a lager yeast when bottle conditioning its beers. Schneider uses yeast taken from billowing open fermentation and krausens with speise (unfermented wort) to add the zesty carbonation for which Bavarian weiss beers are known.

Spaten, of course, is much larger, brewing 2.3 million hectoliters (1.2 million of that wheat) a year, compared to 300,000 at Schneider.

Open fermentation

“It is a very traditional system, and we are a little bit proud of it,” brewery director Hans-Peter Drexler (pictured beside an open fermenter) said last December while showing off the fermentation room. “We are the only one of this size (meaning as large) still doing these things. It is not easy to keep consistency. Each bottle is its own system.”

Dr. Jörg Lehmann of Spaten explained the decision to use a single infusion mash (which is less time consuming and labor intensive) was made because “the malt quality has improved very much.”

Schneider continues to buy much of its barley from farmers in the region of the brewery and often starts with less modified malt. (You don’t want more brewing science, right? The point here is that barley becomes malt, that less modified malt and decoction often go hand in hand, and that the process is less modern.)

“To me the raw ingredients are very important. I like to go talk to the farmers,” Drexler said. “They are doing the hard work, giving us good materials. The soil is poor and outside in the hills the weather can be hard. Maybe that is good for our malt.”

And, in turn, for the beer.