Widmer Brothers Hefe at 30: A Reconsideration

This is the first part of a pair of posts on the legacy of Widmer Brothers Hefe. For the sibling post, an oral history of the beer, go here. 

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The City of Portland officially declared May 15 "Hefe Day."

On Sunday, the Widmer Brothers are throwing a party at Pioneer Courthouse Square to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of their flagship, the venerable Hefeweizen. It is almost impossible to overstate the significance of this beer in the history of its hometown. In the early days of craft brewing, breweries had a hard time convincing beer drinkers to switch over to the heavier, more full-flavored ales they were selling ... until Hefeweizen came along.

It became the city's first breakthrough beer, and in the late 1980s, everyone in the city wanted to hold a tall, curved weizen glass of the cloudy orange liquid, garnished ostentatiously with a lemon slice. In most cities, it took years--often decades--to reach that tipping point where craft beer was an accepted, popular drink. Thanks to Hefeweizen, Portland made the transition by the time Nirvana was first playing Satyricon downtown.

That MTV-era success launched both Widmer Brothers and their strangely-named beer, and both became giants in craft brewing. But it also dated them as surely as shoulder-padded power suits and synthy new wave music. As with any multi-generational phenomenon, Hefeweizen now carries with it the weight of all those impressions that have accumulated over the decades. It's interesting to speak to people who encountered this beer at different times; those who know it from the 80s have entirely different impressions than those who came across it later (see here for more). Those impressions seem to contain as much of the mood of the industry at the time as they do of the beer itself, for good and sometimes ill.

I began my own reconsideration of this beer within the last decade, and particularly when I had to write about it in the Beer Bible. When Kurt and Rob decided to call it a "hefeweizen," they plunged us into a netherworld of stylistic confusion, a legacy with which we're still contending. But, leaving aside the name, the beer turns out to be more interesting, unusual, and influential than we give it credit for--especially us old timers--and it's actually better positioned now than it has been in decades. If you strip away all that history, it looks surprisingly contemporary. And for the first time, it may also be poised to exchange its status of "old" to that rare category of "classic."

"American" Bones
For the past few months, we've been enduring a weird little boomlet in very cloudy IPAs that supposedly come from New England. Oh really? Cloudy beers have been pretty popular here in Oregon since 1986, when Widmer Brothers first launched Hefeweizen. In fact, if you look at the bones of Hefeweizen, it has all the hallmarks of what we have come to think of as the classic American style.

• Cloudiness and rusticity. In 1986, that cloudiness was the most potent rebuke to industrial lagers Portlanders had ever seen. It said, without words or PR gloss, 'this is not your father's Lucky Lager.' That visual cue has been a part of Oregon brewing ever since, though the valence has changed as hops have come into the picture. Haziness is now associated with the addition of bales of hops, and when an IPA is absent at least a shimmer of haze, many drinkers regard it with skepticism. As craft beer gets ever larger and more industrial, that haze becomes a more potent proxy for artisanal. This is all something Rob and Kurt learned in 1986.
• Late hop flavors. American wheat beers have become their own thing. Made with neutral yeast, they accentuate the soft breadiness of the grain and are brewed to be drunk in twos and threes. This style really flourished in the Midwest, where beers like Bell's Oberon and Three Floyds Gumballhead have become perennial favorites. Hefeweizen is not actually a member of this group. It's really a pale ale, featuring a lovely layer of citrusy American hop flavor. The Widmers were certainly not the first to feature the bright notes of Cascade hops, but they understood how well it worked with a beer highlighting a citrus smack. 
•  Sessionability. The life-cycle of craft beer has come back to where it started. Beer was a sessionable drink, and people rarely sat down to drink just one. As craft beer evolved, beers got ever more intense, pulling the focus away from sessionability. Ultimately, drinkers started coming back around to sessionable beers that were full-flavored but not so intense they resisted having a pint or three. Hefeweizen, which combines light hoppiness with a layer of soft malts, is a perfect session beer, and has the complexity even beer geeks admire.

If you look at where American beer is right now, Hefeweizen looks remarkably contemporary. It even predicted the move to fruit. That slice of lemon, once derided by purists as a gimmick, doesn't look at all out of place in a world where grapefruit IPAs are the hottest trend. Go pour out a Hefeweizen and then grab another old-time craft standard--a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, for example--and pour that out for comparison. Which one seems more in keeping with the mood of 2016? Not that strange, heavy, bitter old IPA, that's for sure.

Sustained Success

It's also worth noting how few beers introduced in the 80s are still on the market. Beer is a commercial product, and breweries can't afford to keep any brand alive for nostalgic reasons. In the thirty years since Widmer Brothers released Hefe, they've introduced scores of beers to the market. They would happily be brewing, say, Drifter Pale Ale now if it were still selling well. But breweries can only afford to sell what people are buying When I spoke to Rob Widmer earlier this week, he mentioned how this phenomenon affected Hefe's predecessor, Weizenbier. It was actually just a filtered version of Hefeweizen, but it couldn't compete with its unexpectedly alluringly cloudy incarnation:

“Backing up even further, there were very few people who appreciated Altbier. We were kind of circling the drain—there wasn’t really any velocity there at all. We introduced the Weizenbier because we realized people wanted something that was a little more approachable. So Weizen really saved us. Originally we hoped to have Altbier, Weizenbier, and Hefe on tap. What we found was that Weizen drinkers, once they discovered Hefe, they just stopped. Over the course of the rest of ’86, we just slowly wound down Weizen. It was bittersweet; we hated to see that Weizenbier go.”

Over the course of thirty years, the craft beer segment has changed radically--and gone through several stages along the way. Each one of those shifts in preferences killed off a certain number of formerly-popular beers. But ever since its introduction, Hefeweizen has been far and away the most popular Widmer Brothers beer, even as other brands in the portfolio came and went. Over the thirty years since its introduction, they've brewed millions of barrels of the stuff. There's never been a time when it didn't account for the lion's share of the brewery's production and sales.

Sometimes craft beer fans are wary of the old. When he was master brewer at BridgePort, Karl Ockert called this the "novelty curve"--that period when a new beer sells well simply because its new. Other industry watchers call it "drinker promiscuity." Popularity is a double-edged sword, though. Everyone's trying to capture that lightning, but holding on to it--that's the trick. One of the reasons Hefeweizen has had this sustained success, year after year, era after era, is because it has a classic timelessness that people respond to.

I will confess that in the 1980s and '90s, I was not much a Hefeweizen fan. It had a status in that era of an entry-level beer. In the '80s, it also had an association with yuppies that warded me off. (For youngsters, yuppies, though very different in class and status, were sort of the hipsters of their day: a lot more people were called yuppies than claimed to be one.) It wasn't until sometime in the 2000s that I rediscovered Hefeweizen, and I was startled by what I found. My own palate had gone through that shift toward balance and subtle complexity, and I discovered what a triumph Hefeweizen was. In the years since, I will occasionally find myself in a place with a mediocre tap list that includes Hefe. I smile as I order it, knowing I've discovered this wonderful gem hiding there among the Stellas and Blue Moons.

After years of seeming like they were vaguely embarrassed by Hefeweizen, the Widmer Brothers have started to give full-throated support to their flagship again. Sales are up. They've even begun extending the brand a bit with beers like Hefe Shandy. (I'd love to see a cloudy, wheaty, late-hop IPA next; it would bear all the fingerprints of its ancestor and be on the cutting edge of the new trend.) My sense is that even beer geeks have come back around to it.

If you survive long enough, you're no longer old. You're classic. Maybe Widmer Hefeweizen has, after thirty years, finally gotten there.

Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen, An Oral History

This is the second part of a pair of posts on the legacy of Widmer Brothers Hefe. For the sibling post, a reconsideration of the beer itself, go here. 

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Good beers that manage to survive any time at all pass from the ownership of a brewery into the hands of a community. They survive because they create a strong impression in people's minds, often associated with key moments in life. I put out a call on Facebook and via email for reminiscences, and they form a rather striking portrait. I've arranged these chronologically, and interspersed among them are quotes from Rob Widmer, whom I spoke to earlier this week. Some of the folks are private citizens and beer fans, others may be familiar to you. But all tell a similar story.

I'm going to get things rolling by telling my own story. Widmer Hef--the name I've used for 28 years--was never one of my go-to beers. The doorway into good beer for me was stout, but I happened to live in Portland in the 80s and I had eyes--you really didn't need anything more to be aware of this beer. I first became aware of it in about 1988, the year the brothers installed a test brewery in the B. Moloch restaurant in what is now Southpark. It had already been gaining steam for a couple years, but that brewery, in a downtown location (all the little breweries at the time were in the cheaper, industrial areas), really helped magnetize people. Holding a vase glass of Hef and a wedge of lemon became an early status symbol in Portland. The visual presentation was so distinctive that people really wanted to be a part of it. Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen was astonishingly popular, and took beer from the pubs into the upper echelon of Portland's eateries. It transcended gender. I have very little doubt that one of the reasons craft beer became so broadly adopted was because Hefe crashed through so many barriers so early on.

“It was not long after we started pouring Hefe at the Dublin Pub. It was a Friday night and I was sitting at the bar with Carl Simpson, the proprietor, and he said, ‘I’m going to do something here. Watch what happens—this is incredible.’ He was already using the half-liter weizenbier glasses, so he filled up the four glasses, garnished them with lemon, put them on a tray, and had the waitress just walk around. There were tables full of people, and conversations would stop. When she would walk through, people would look at the tray, they would point, and you could tell how it completely grabbed their attention. By midnight everybody had one of those half liters of Hefe in front of them.”
Rob Widmer

The combination of the look, the flavor, and the approachability made it a big status symbol in the city.

"My own recollection has to do with my racquetball club, where I have now been a member for 27 years. In the early days, they had three taps…Bud, Bud Light and Widmer Hef. We played a lot of racquetball games for beer throughout the 1990s. If you really wanted to go for the gusto, you played for Widmer Hef. It was considered the gold standard. They kept lemon slices in a plastic bin behind the counter for all the folks who ordered pitchers of Hef. Man did that stuff taste great when it was paid for by some poor suckers. Major status symbol when you were drinking Hef while the other chumps sipped Bud or Bud Light."
Pete Dunlop

When he visited Oregon several years back, Stan Hieronymus noticed that haziness was a unifying theme in local beers. One reason is because so many of us were introduced to good beer in the form of that cloudy, yeasty Hefeweizen.

"I first had Widmer Hefe in the fall of 1988. I had moved to Portland to go to college, and we drank a ton of Henry's ale. But the Widmer Hefe was a revelation.  There wasn't another cloudy beer, the flavor seemed remarkable, and everyone would freak out when a keg got tapped. That beer was a huge favorite for everyone all through college - really the preferred keg to buy if you had an extra $20 or whatever it was. I do recall the sort of buzz and excitement whenever you heard that someone had a keg."
Van Havig

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"I recall drinking it in the very early 90's and was surprised by the enormous amount of yeast in it. It really looked like a milkshake back then. I had just spent a semester in Vienna (not the Weizenbier capital, mind you) and had enjoyed a few Bavarian Hefeweizens, but wasn't an expert at that point. When I talked with Rob Widmer in 1997 before starting my studies at the VLB, he said they renamed it an American Hefeweizen. That, I thought, was a great addition to the moniker. The yeast load has definitely dropped since then, but it was one of the first fresh and local micro brews I had and it was special."
Alan Taylor

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“We have all of our recipes, including weizen. But it was not really a batch of Hefe, it was just weizen. I have the kegging log that shows that when we were kegging that batch, we bypassed filtration and just went direct to keg, and those are the ones that went to the Dublin Pub. So there isn’t really a Hefe recipe. Some we filtered, and some we didn’t, and that was Hefe. That was the thing—the weizenbier was just a bitch to filter and once Hefe really started to go, we were like, ‘this is the greatest thing in the world.’ We could go right out of the tank and into the kegs; it saved us a day. Filtering ten barrels of Weizen was ridiculous, and all of a sudden—boom!—didn’t need to.” 
Rob Widmer

And then of course there's the issue of the lemon slice. Now we regularly add citrus to beer, but back in the 80s, this was seen as a lot of things--innovative, transgressive, gimmicky. It seems now to be mainly recalled with affection.

"In 1992, there was a small beer shop just off campus in Eugene called Taste of Germany. It had mainly imported German beers with one notable exception, this cloudy yellowish beer called 'Hefeweizen' from Widmer Brothers. I had never heard of it, having a naive beer palate. We ordered a pitcher, and the host gave us a small plate of limes... and it was heaven. A cloudy taste of flavor unlike anything I had ever had at that point. A Widmere Hefe with a lime not lemon, to this day, remains my all time favorite beverage."
Dann Cutter

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"I remember living in Ashland in the mid-90s. This was prior to Widmer Hef being available in anything but kegs. We would go sit at Omar's on campus and order pitchers, the rims of which would be lined with lemon slices."
Matthew Diment

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“I guess it was Carl Simpson at the Dublin Pub [who first garnished with lemon]. Carl was already doing that with our weizen. When we went with Hefe, it just stuck.” After considering it more, he continued, “Well, honestly, I don’t know. Did we start it? I don’t know if Carl started it or if we started it.”
Rob Widmer

It seems that the Widmers' flagship was also something of a siren, calling people to this land of cloudy skies and cloudy beer.

"In the mid-90's I lived in Illinois, a craft beer wasteland. If you wanted a beer in the Land of Lincoln, your choices were macro. Miller Lite and Bud Lite where essentially your options. I chose to avoid beer entirely. Around this time, I visited Portland for the first time on a business trip. While at dinner, one of my co-workers suggested I taste a local beer. I recalled hearing something about Portland having decent beer, so I figured I'd give it a try. I asked the server to surprise me, and she brought back a tall curvy glass filled with what appeared to be orange juice. After attempting to send back the orange juice, she told me it was a beer called Hefeweizen."

With a few sips, the seeds of my beer journey were planted, and I have the Widmer Brothers to thank for it. Widmer Hefeweizen has always held a special place in my heart because it was my first good beer. It was unlike anything I ever tasted."
Sanjay Reddy

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"My first taste of Widmer Hefeweizen came from a 6 pack I purchased from a convenience store in Washington D.C. Seeing a Portland brewery on the shelf, while picking up snacks, was a landmark moment for me. This was during my nascent years as a beer drinker. At the time, as an east coaster, all beers from the west coast seemed exotic and were presumed to be superior. The limitations of distribution in the early 2000s meant that I had few occasions to drink west coast beer. I returned to my friend's apartment. We sat on his porch and drank the beer straight from the bottle. I recall the seed of moving to Portland being planted in my head on that day. I wasn’t savvy enough to appreciate the construction of the beer, or its legacy. But I liked it, and bought another 6 pack before I returned home to New Jersey. The Hefeweizen provided a distraction from the beers I was exposed to at the time. It didn’t taste what I thought of as ‘German.’ It wasn’t laden with crystal malt. But in the beer I was able to capture an essence of something changing. It was intriguing enough to get me thinking about something beyond what’s inside the bottle."
Josh Grgas 

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I had my first Hefe in 2002 in Pittsburgh, PA. It was fantastic. I worked at a bar that was on the forefront of supporting craft beer, and it really was life changing.

"One of my favorite memories I have was when Rob and I delivered an hours-old keg of Hefe to the Dublin Pub for the kickoff of the first 100 Days of Hefe celebration. I had the honor of donning Kurt's leather apron, and the signature red carnation that the brothers would take to each delivery in the old days. We loaded up the old Datsun and made the (slow) trip to the Dublin, where Rob pulled the keg-unloading move with the tire he had done thousands of times before (I think there is video somewhere. I'll try to find it, or maybe Brady has access to it). It was a special experience that I'll remember always, and the beer that flowed after we tapped that keg was the best tasting Hefe I had ever had (and I've had a lot of Hefes)."
Aaron Burget (who left Pittsburgh and ended up working at Widmer for a time)

And since no story is complete without the alternate view, we go to a drinker who came to this beer knowing what the word "hefeweizen" meant. With predictable (and fairly common) results.

"I remember being very excited to taste my first Widmer Hefe back in 2002. Having grown up watching my grandpa get home delivery of Maisel's hefe by the case and drinking it leisurely in the garden on summer days, I couldn't have been more stoked to return to my birthplace and begin feeding those olfactory memories (of beer!) from childhood."

"So when I got my first beautiful looking pint in the classic Hefe glass (and tossed the lemon slice away), I took a big strong sip ... and exclaimed "bleaugh! What is this crap on tap?" Thus my introduction to something called 'American style Hefeweizen.'"
Mark Bunster

You may wonder why I buried the negative recollections--and I'm sure there are some. But perhaps people decided this was the moment to praise this icon of American brewing rather than bury it. In any case, no one sent me an unkind word.

Please feel free and invited to share your own stories in comments. Prost!

Deschutes' Strange New Beer - Miss Spelt Hefeweizen

In what is surely the best pitches to a blogger I've seen, Deschutes recently sent out two unmarked bottles of beer along with this brief letter:

"We invite you to fill the difficult role of 'Deschutes Brewery Beer Tester.' We know it's a lot to ask, but we'd love to get your feedback on a beer that we've been experimenting with in our Bend and Portland pubs for the last several months.

"Currently named Miss Spelt Hefeweizen, this brew has been so popular in the pub locations that we've bottled up a small sampling to get some feedback from the professionals: YOU.

"We're not going to tell you much about it: we want yoru opinion, unsullied by our explanations. Please let us know what you think about Deschutes Brewery's take on this popular style of beer. We can't wait to hear back from you."

It is always a good move to laud the genius of your reviewer's palate before you serve her your beer. We feel quite clever that way, and predisposed to like the beer. So a bow of admiration to the brewery before we get into those opinions of mine they are so keen to hear. Gassho.

Tasting Notes
Thanks to the confounding Widmer Hef, you are never sure what to expect when you crack a bottle bearing that name. In the case of Miss Spelt, we are looking east, toward Bavaria. In these wheat beers, the process of fermentation produces various compounds, notably phenols and isoamyl acetate, that characterize the style. In other words, the banana and clove for which it is famous. (For more on how open fermentation, wide fermenters, ferulic acid and other factors help create these distinctive characteristics, I commend to you Stan Hieronymus' excellent Brewing With Wheat. Again.)

As for Miss Spelt, the Google tells us what the press release won't--that at least one previous batch was made with 40% spelt. This ancient grain is closely related to wheat, but contains less gluten and is more easily tolerated by folks (like me, actually) who have slight wheat intolerance. That reference I found also puts Miss Spelt at 28 IBUs and 5.3% alcohol. No doubt this is a slightly rejiggered recipe, but it's a decent jumping-off point.

I love German hefeweizens. The combination of phenols, esters, and a crisp, tart finish make them the unbeatable summer beer. On a hot day, nothing can compete. But spelt hefs? Let's say I'm so far not convinced.

Miss Spelt produces a rich, billowy head and has great effervescence. Right down to the end of the glass, it is animated by lively bubbles. The aroma is inviting, with light clove and a strong dose of bubblegum. I lunged in for a fair gulp, but was surprised by the strange texture and disorienting flavor. It's thin and sweet, and has a strange, yogurt-like/milky note. I say yogurt because there's a slight sour turn to it. The aftertaste drags on quite a long while, creating a thin, tinny flavor that lingers on the mouth a good minute after a swallow. As I said, hefeweizens should end with a dry, crisp note, but this is watery and lingering. I didn't need to go back for another pull because I was still sampling the last one--not ideal in a summer beer.

Reading through Stan's book, you get the sense that there's a huge amount of science going on with a simple wheat beer. The presence of ferulic acid, to which I alluded earlier, is critical in producing the appropriate flavor compounds. They're here, but other compounds are too, ones absent from other hefs. I presume shifting to such a large percentage of spelt messes with the chemistry, and this yogurt and tin stuff is the consequence. Deschutes claims the beer is quite popular in their pubs, and I have no reason to think they're polishing apples there. But it's not popular with me.

Pass me a Weihenstephaner instead.
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PHOTO: JOHN FOYSTON