Dark Smoky Wheat Beer
Ellenberg's Brewery

Ruby brown with fast-fading tan foam. 3.5
Scrummy bacon fries nose. 4
Fruit cake malts, phenolic yeast hit, kola nut, and some noble hop spice. 4
Birch beer end and rooty linger.
Lt-med, snappy, some cling. 4

-- Judicious smoke - even with the weizen yeast, phenols don’t overwhelm. No esters; banana is MIA. I’d agree with the label: a great food beer. Lovely all around. 4.25

Purchased from the UTOBEER beer shop in the Borough Market, London, bottle-conditioned in a slim 500ml brown bottle; bottled on 11/04/2013, BB 10/11/2014, served mildly chilled in a pint-size weizen glass.

A: pours a deeply dark brown colour with reddish hues, coming with a fluffy dark beige head dissipating quickly, on top of a rather lively level of carbonation.
S: beech wood-smoked malts, dark sugar and Chinese smoked prunes make up the front aroma, with a decent dosage of acidity and saltiness; given a good swirl, a little bit of clove-ish esters emerges from underneath, but only just a little…
T: quite effervescent comes the foretaste, the flavour is gently smoky with gristy dark malts and bitter-sweet nuts in the middle, ensued by an almost azuki bean-like undertones lingering in the slightly dry-ish and also savoury finish. Unlike what’s advised by the beer label, the banana and clove-ish esters typical for a dunkel hefeweizen are rather restrained on the overall performance.
M&O: refreshing enough due to the fizziness given by the bottle-conditioning, but the fizziness comes slightly too sharp and not quite as one would expect of the natural and smooth carbonation from a hefeweizen; medium-bodied, easy-to-drink, a bit simplistic, and all in all the smokiness seems to outweigh the hefeweizen features and render it more of a hybrid smoked beer than of a smoked offshoot of a true Dunkel Hefeweizen.