100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #15
White beers, or witbiers, are a Belgian style of light, spiced wheat ale. Hoegaarden is a famous example. Amadeus is a witbier, but it’s from France so they call it something else, in a language that people actually use.
“Bière blanche sur lie, à déguster très fraîche, seule ou accompagnée d’une rondelle de citron.” If I understand that right, this is an unfiltered white beer, and it’s ok to drink it in your car if you drive a trendy little hatchback. The defiantly untranslated bottle is giving a hint of things to come. You know how sometimes a wheat beer like Blue Moon will be served with a slice of orange—and then the beer has no head at all once it gets to you and have to figure out where to pile all of the beer-soaked bits of orange—since it tastes orangey? Amadeus tastes like lemon.
Though this is a beer on lees (at least I hope that’s what sur lie means), bottled with yeast, Amadeus came in a 75cl bottle, effectively providing filtering by decantation. Smaller bottles of witbier produce the same effect, making it customary to give the bottle a good swish to mix in the yeasts before finishing the pour, but I don’t know what the ettiquette is when pouring from a bottle that has more than one glass’s worth. I just left it alone until the end. So, semi-filtered as it became, Amadeus poured a clear, very light yellow with a big fluffy head. The smell was almost all sweet lemons, like an effervescent lemonade, with an elusive hint of what seemed like Hefeweizen banana. The taste offered a little more by way of some spices—I don’t know what, probably corriander, and something that tastes like cinnamon maybe?—but again the theme was sugar and lemon, more sweet than sour. In all it’s light and crisp and a good remedy to a hot day, but it doesn’t have a lot to say.