Weiss Guy
Stonehooker Brewing Company

At my lady Pamela's house; canned and chilled, from Small Batch Dispatch's August 2024 curation. My first beer from the Mississauga, Ontario brewery. Nice!

Nov 12 2024

Easy drinking, mild wheat beer, with a bit more body than a usual Hefeweizen. Yellowish in colour, more than I would have expected for the style. Overall, great for a hot summer day.

 

Appearance: Alright, this is a pet peeve of mine, Hefeweizen should not be clear, so when I see it on the side of the can, it bugs me since since literally all you had to to was change the name to Kristalweizen or left the style off the can and you would have be fine. Instead, this golden to bronze lager clear offering with moderate carbonation has cost you points. It produced a finger of head that did not lace nor retain, so we aren't off to a good start here.

Smell: Mild banana with a touch of barley that improves with warming. Adequate potency here, but there's nothing here that's blowing me away.

Taste: It's mild, it starts with some mild banana and shortbread malt as a touch of clove but mostly the earlier banana rises up with a less sweet bread malt. It's not bad, but once again frustrating because it's too light and mild for a good hefe.

Mouthfeel: Points get deducted for the lackluster head, but the transitioning is nice and it does leave a slight mild banana aftertaste that doesn't cloy. Carbonation is doing it's darnedest across the entire beer, making for that rare good soapy taste, it just doesn't have enough to work with.

Drinkability: Yes, it's easy to drink and would be a welcome early or late summer drink to replace your lager with. I can see it going well with fish tacos or a hot dog. It's not quite light bodied though, but it does make it work as that getting that sudsy, soapy note down isn't common. Still, it's milder then it should fundamentally be.

Final Thoughts: This beer is a textbook example of why you should brand your beer correctly, and not try to use style names to market your beer as something it's not. This beer wasn't bad, but it was frustrating, because it's not a Hefe, even though it's branded as such. It's a milder Kristalweizen and I would have been a heck of a lot nicer to it in that regard. It would have pulled this beer likely past 3.5 had it been sold as that. After the solid Whipstaff Wit, I was really hoping for a more potent, banana and bubble gum like wheat experience that matched that earlier offering. Instead I got a misbranded far too mild disappointment.