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.
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