Neuen Horizonten verdammt!

Way out of my comfort zone, on the murk side of Holland, and ever so discreetly bordering on Belgium proper, lies Germany.

Map not entirely up to date.

Remember what I said about Belgians and their low esteem of foreign beer? Well, all of that applies particularly to Germany, whom whe've still not forgiven for that string of military fisticuffs sometime ago.

German beer, to most Belgians, is perhaps even worse than Dutch beer for a single reason. In our opinion (and I must stress this is just me voicing the average Belgian's culturally dictated appraisal of foreign beer, and certainly not my very personal own) the Dutch  are merely incapable of brewing anything other than nauseating lager. Just order any commercial Dutch pilsner and you'll come to understand us backward Belgians a bit better
The Germans are worse because they choose to brew bland beers. Yes, the infamous reinheitsgebot puts certain (stringent) limitations on German breweries, and to the historically more liberal Belgian brewer, this equals bland, uninspired, dull beer.

But hark!

My buddy Frank (no, not that Frank, the other Frank again, the one...oh whatever, just Frank will do for now) made a generous contribution to my beer cellar recently, and among the acquired stash was this charming fellow:

Naturally opaque yeasty white-beer , in proper English.

My first real weissbier (I'm deliberately not counting any Belgian white beers or blanchekes, nor any of the more ubiquitous German weissbiers you might encounter the world over), this came highly recommended by just about anyone interested in beer, as it's something of a standard for the style.

Hefeweizen (weizen and weiss would appear to be synonymous) is a wheat beer (meaning it's mostly made from malted wheat, instead of malted barley), with a pronounced estery flavour coming from a particular strain of top-fermenting yeast.

The Paulaner pours spectacularly, with the densest, pillowiest head I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. True to style, the beer isn't clear but shows a typical wheat haze, which makes the warm orange colour really stand out. Beautiful pour, this one, and my Belgian roots are already withering.

That nose. Oh Saint Arnoldus blessed be, that nose is out of this world.
Coming back to Belgium, ever since beer got stuck in the elevator of trendy beverages, "Belgian" is now officially a flavour, rather than a denominator of nationality or origin.. A tripel can be whatever you want, but if you say it has a "Belgian" taste to it, even beer geeks in Singapore will know what you mean(*).
Why am I bordercrossing back to my home turf here? Because if Paulaner's nose is at all representative of the hefeweizen style, then "German" should be a flavour too.

*) especially of you throw in other buzz words like funk and barnyard.

Where Belgian yeasty beers tend to focus on fruits (banana, citrus, apple, pear, what have you), this hefeweizen displays a dazzling aray of spices, ranging from clove to nutmeg, and probably some others in between. Words fall short, but this beer smells amazing.
In the mouth, you get that same spicy, mulled impression. Combined with the naturaly crispy sourness which all wheat bears display, what you have here is an immensely drinkable, yet surprisingly complex beer. A beer which instantly makes me regret any diminutive comments I may have ever made regarding Prussian beer.

Frank's gift did not end there. Paulaner Hefeweizen is a benchmark in its own right, but so is this one:

Schneider Weisse Tap 5: Meine Hopfenweisse

Schneider has a range of these "weizens", numbered and somewhat quaintly named. To turn language barriers into true Iron Curtain-style obstacles, this Hopfenweisse is actually a weisse doppelbock.

Yeah. Makes more sense in the glass.

Not just any doppelbock, but a hoppy one to boot. In a way, this makes the Schneider5 something between a weizen and an IPA.

Pour is remarkbly clear (wait for it): even though it's a lager (which no, is not synonymous with cheap ass pilsner you heathen), it's still a wheat-based beer, and hence I'd expected it to be hazy. But no, the first half (waaaaaaait for iiiiitttt) presented as a dark, lightly coppery lager, with a lanky head.

In the nose, there's a dazzling burst of hops going on: herbal, piney and resiny, undulating into flowery and back again. Not sure which hops are in this beer, but the nose made me think of some of  the UK ales I've sampled a year ago in London, with an almost soapy character to it. While it's not a hop bomb like so many (often US or NZ) hoppy IPAs, it's definitely a hoppy beer, make no mistake. But like UK hoppy ales, the hops take on a different identity from what we're used to over here. And while the result is a bit alienating, it is (if nothing else) intriguing.
Flavour-wise, weirdness abounds. The strong hop profile, combined with the fruitness of the wheat and the relatively high alcohol content (8.9% ABV) turn this in a perfumed beer, delicate but wafting at the same time. It's nothing like a modern era IPA, despite having a distinctly hoppy profile, and it's nothing like a weizen either, in that the wheat plays second (if not third) fiddle to the hops and (I'm on a limb here) the yeast.
Besides soapy hops (and this sounds less appealing than it really was), there's the fruity, almost lactic tartness of the wheat, and a gammut of spicy yeast: cloves again, mace and a hint of lemon peel, again teased by that ambiguous flowery note.

While very, very tasty, it's also a bit tiresome, as if it were a wheat beer with ADHD. Oh and that remarkably clear pour?

Guess what came with the second half?

Now I'm not fussy about the clairy of my beer. A live beer, a proper living beer, is allowed (nay, expected!) to be a bit hazy. But this is perhaps a bit much. Zoom in on that pic and you'll find bits of debris floating about, happily contributing to a lot of things, but not to aesthetics. The contrast with the clean, clear lager pour of the first half could not be greater if the beer had suddenly lit up a bright blue neon and started humming the theme to Allo Allo.
In other yeasty beers, adding the sediment will emphasise the yeast characteristics, but in this already very yeasty weizen, it added nothing but murk, so I advise pouring it carefully, in a large enough glass, and simply leaving the sediment in the bottle.

So.

Where, except waaaaaay out of my comfort zone, does that leave me?

I'm intrigued. I'd never imagined wheat beers to be this complex, and the fact that they're both German makes me all  boingboing with anticipation: a whole "new" country to explore. So many styles, now famous thanks to the booming craft- and home brew scene, which I know nothing about: alt, weizen, bock, what have you...

These were two fine specimens in their own right, and excellent ambassadors to German brewing. Just by themselves, they've established that there's more to German beer than gallon-sized jugs of watery Oktoberfestbier, and have made of me a man with a mission: to learn more about Germany and its beers and, if at all possible, spread the word across the border, that Prussia is still a force to be reckoned with.

I'll make sure not to mention Ze Var.

Until then,

Greetz

Jo