Some breakfasts are so good that even the crappiest world cup final in history cannot ruin them.
Brooklyn's "Brooklyner-Schneider" Hopfen-Weisse is a wonderful beer. It is a "concept" beer that actually works. Story goes like this: Brewmasters Garrett Oliver (Brooklyn) and Hans Peter Drexler (Schneider, a.k.a. Private Weissbierbrauerei G. Schneider & Sohn GmbH) are friends. Oliver loves Schneider's Weisse beer, and Drexler loves Brooklyn's East India IPA. They decided to combine the recipes, with each brewer creating a version of the concoction in the other brewer's brewery. Sounds to me like a sordid plan to write off a drunken holiday as a tax-refundable business expense. Kudos.
The resulting brew (Brooklyn version — I doubt I could get hold of the Schneider version) is a 8.8% wheat beer with the hop profile of a double IPA. It smells like a banana milkshake laced with pine sap. The taste is incredible. The zingy edge of the wheat beer style is utterly corrupted by the hops and also by the black-spice flavours resulting from the beer's imperial treatment. As you expect from imperial wheat beers, there is a dry fruitiness and some soured-pear sweetness, which give the beer a big and complicated body. And that's before you factor in the thick and sticky soup of hops which — outrageously — sits in the balance just right.
Surely one of the only beers that could compete with a HP sauce-laden English breakfast without falling apart.
Get some if you can. It is one cup that won't let you down.
We recently got the Schneider version in Ontario and it's very interesting to see how the two beers are quite similar and yet vary significantly. Very interesting experiment.
ReplyDeleteSuch a disappointing World Cup. And an incredibly disappointing final. It looks like you have found the correct remedy for such appalling football!
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