100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #3
Magic Hat is a brewery in Burlington, VT whose beers have recently been showing up here and there in the Atlanta area. That’s about all I know about them, so I decided to give their hefeweizen a shot.
“Hefeweizen” is German for “yeast wheat,” which makes no sense, but more or less just means that it’s a beer brewed with malted wheat and left unfiltered to give it a cloudy look. It differs from witbiers in that the Belgish are allowed to use spices and stuff, like coriander and orange peel, whereas the flavor in a hefeweizen depends entirely on the wheat, yeast and hops. Or at least that’s what a hefeweizen is in Germany; American-made ones are often quite different, and Circus Boy is one of those.
Those sciency Sam Adams glasses seem to share a few properties with a weizen glass, so I used one of those. The first thing I noticed upon opening the bottle (12 oz.) was that Magic Hat apparently prints things beneath the cap (“Waste Time, Collect ‘em all”). The second thing I noticed was that, though the packaging insists that this beer is unfiltered and kraaa-zy like some kind of circus freak, it didn’t seem very unfiltered. It was cloudy, just not as cloudy as I would expect; I could still see through to the other side of the glass. The beer formed a moderate head that thinned quickly and stuck around like that for the rest of the glass. The smell is pretty much all malt.
The taste is almost all malty sweetness and citrus (mostly orangey) from the Amarillo hops, with a little bit of bitterness. It has a little heavier feel than yesterdays lager, but other than that it’s similarly smooth and refreshing going down. And that’s about it. There aren’t any of the hints of clove or banana that I would expect in a hefeweizen; it’s just a sweet, clear ale that happened to be brewed with wheat. It’s not bad, it just seems kind of middle-of-the-road. Based on this beer and the fancy, hip-looking packaging, I get the feeling that Magic Hat spends more time on marketing than on making beer.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
You’ve pretty much got Magic Hat’s number. I’ve seen plenty of tap handles with their name on it up here and been to their brewery, and it’s definitely more of a lifestyle focus than a beer focus. I just don’t see a whole lot of variety in their beers. For instance, every single variety pack they sell contains #9. It’s too bad because they could be a really great little brewery and it’s a small enough operation that I’d like to be pulling for them. After all, their bottling line is a couple guys sticking bottles into boxes that have been put together by machine. It’s no industrial process brewing conglomerate.
Regarding hefeweizens – American wheat beers typically use similar recipes to German wheat beers, but use regular old pale ale yeast instead of funky wheat beer yeast. The result is a much cleaner, simpler, and (in my mind) blander beer that lacks all the fruit and banana flavors you expect from a German hefeweizen. To me, those banana and clove flavors are what make it a wheat beer. It sounds like Magic Hat’s gone the common American route here and stuck with the pale ale yeast. Oh well.
April 11th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Both the Magic Hat website and wiki (which has different information on the hops, for some reason) say that it uses “Hefeweizen yeast,” so the lack of any spice or fruit (other than the orange taste from the hops) is still a bit of a surprise. Maybe they just arbitrarily slapped a hefeweizen label on some other strain of yeast, I don’t know. It does fit your description, though: clean, simple and pretty uninteresting.