Commentist Beer Barrel: Yes We Can

Austin is a great, great place to be a beer nerd, with roughly two dozen breweries and a wide variety of beer from all across the country on the shelves. When I first moved back to Austin eight years ago, though, the landscape looked very different. Preposterous licensing fees and nonsensical labeling requirements—Texas law at one time required that all beer above 5% be labeled as “ale” regardless of the way it was actually brewed, presumably just because someone wanted to be a dick about beer—kept a lot of America’s best breweries out of the state. There were only about four local breweries, too, but the good news was that one of those breweries was Live Oak, an outfit focused on incredibly careful and faithful recreations of classic German beer styles. From their founding in 1997 until a couple of weeks ago, Live Oak’s beer was bafflingly available only on draught, but as you likely spotted in the picture above, their hefeweizen—aptly and cleverly named HefeWeizen—is now in slick-looking twelve-ounce cans, with cans of their pilsner and Vienna lager coming soon. At long last, I can drink this shit at home. Thanks, Obama.

There’s probably no way to talk about something called “mouthfeel” without sounding like either a snob or a toddler, but I’ll have to do my best here because the way Live Oak HefeWeizen feels on the tongue is probably the most striking thing about it. It’s light and substantial all at once—I can’t think of a better word for it than “fluffy.” The flavor is a mix of banana, clove, and bubblegum, essentially the holy trinity of hefeweizen flavors, all of them natural products of the style’s unique yeast strain. It’s sweet without being cloying, spicy without being overbearing, and above all, light without being remotely boring. Guys, I’ve had some hefeweizens in my day. Most American versions are just boring-ass beers with wheat in them, missing all the complexity that the German hefeweizen yeast provides. The German examples are, of course, leagues better; it’s hard to outdo the inventor on his own turf.  Weihenstephaner and Franziskaner make great, great hefeweizens. But for me, this local legend is the best hefeweizen in the whole wide world.

Grade: The highest. The absolute highest. I don’t know what number or letter would signify that, on my grading scale, because my grading scale is at best a flimsy pretext for me to say more nice things about a beer I like. Let’s just say that this is one of the very few truly perfect beers I’ve ever had.

lady snow says: I think it’s delicious and awesome, as usual. I love it.

make it snow says: Pretend it’s the first time you’ve had it.

lady snow says: I can’t. You can only ever have one first Live Oak HefeWeizen. I’m spoiled now.

make it snow says: Okay, fair. Tell me what you love about it.

lady snow says: I didn’t get much foam on this pour, compared to the usual, but I like how the foam tastes sort of like beer yogurt. I like that I can enjoy the subtle flavors in this, too, because there’s no one flavor that’s too overwhelming. And I like that it has, at least to me, some saltiness. Like black olives. I don’t get the clove so much. I get that people experience it as clove, but it’s not what I think of.

make it snow says: This is probably a good example of implicit bias in beer tasting. I’ve been told it’s clove, and that’s what I experience it as, but whatever, right? There aren’t actual cloves in the beer. It’s all just water, hops, barley, wheat, and yeast, and we’re just looking for things to compare it to. You say black olive? I say you’re right.

tl;dr: If you buttchug this, it’s technically can-to-can and you should be prepared for the consequences.

make it snow is an alot of beer who hopes you’re not all buried in snow today. He drank most of three cans of Live Oak HefeWeizen while writing this review.