How to Identify Wheat Beer

Wheat beer, known in its German homeland as weissbier or weizenbier, is a special style of ale. As its name implies, brewers make wheat beer using large amounts of malted wheat, in addition to the more traditional malted barley. Like other ales, wheat beers are light, fruity and refreshing and have survived centuries of changing tastes to remain one of the world's oldest and most cherished brews.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Check the beer's flavor for a distinct fruitiness. Wheat beer's top-fermenting ale yeast gives it a noticeably fruity tinge. Apple, citrus and, even, banana flavors are common.

2. Look at the beer's head. Wheat beers usually have a dense, creamy foam top that lasts for a fairly long time.

3. Observe the color and opacity of the beer. Like other ales, wheat beers are typically pale amber in color. They're also uniquely cloudy, a characteristic produced by the high protein concentration of the wheat during fermentation.

4. Take a whiff of the beer and try to detect a hint of clove in its aroma. The yeast brewers use to ferment this style of beer leaves it with both an aroma and a flavor of clove.

5. Determine the beer's alcohol content. Wheat beers are fairly mild in terms of alcoholic strength and will be somewhere between 5 to 6 percent alcohol by volume.

6. Notice the amount of carbonation in the beer. Wheat beers have high carbonation to balance the sweetness added by the malt flavors.

7. Make sure the beer isn't overly bitter. Classic wheat beer weighs it at around 15 units out of 100 on the IBU scale, so it's pretty tame in terms of bitterness.

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