Classic Weizenbock Recipe
Ron Barchet, the cofounder and brewmaster at Victory Brewing Company (Downingtown, Pennsylvania) reminisces about weizenbock and the brewery’s recipe, long a fan favorite, which will make a limited comeback later this year.
“I fell in love with weizenbock after a visit to G. Schneider & Sohn’s weissbier brewery (Bavaria, Germany) when I was studying at Weihenstephan. Weissbier was a popular choice outside of the ubiquitous and lovely helles. None of this prepared me for my first weizenbock experience. At the time, Schneider Weisse Aventinus was one of fewer than ten that were being brewed in all of Germany. The intensity of maltiness, with rich clove notes and hints of banana, was literally intoxicating.
“Victory began brewing our Moonglow Weizenbock in the early 2000s. We went with a slightly stronger take (doppelbock) on the style, with an emphasis on rich malts and fruity esters. The recipe has evolved slightly since its inception, as we tried to simplify the malt bill. Ultimately, we came back to the original malts because of the complexity of esters and phenols they create during fermentation.”
er production of esters—isoamyl acetate, the characteristic banana flavor, as well as other minor players—and phenols.
Drexler had been brewing at Schneider for decades when I visited him. He must have walked into the fermentation room hundreds of times. Still, when we stepped into it that day, he visibly winced. “The challenge of this system is the hygienic problem of the open fermentors,” he said. “Everything has to be very, very clean.”
Humans carry all kinds of yeast and bacteria on their bodies, and his anxiety told me exactly how clean he thought we were. Giant fermentors dotted the bubbling foaming sanctum, their tops rising waist high and filled with roiling beer. Those happy yeast cells were busily gobbling up Drexler’s carefully composed wort and turning it into a kind of beer that had been made in that area for more than 400 years. The room smelled incredible.
As we exited, Drexler said rather casually, “After 5 to 6 days or so, depending on the beer style, we move straight from the first fermentation to the bottling. On the way, between fermentation and bottling, we add the ‘food,’ the speise, and that’s it.” Wait, what? Straight from these vessels to the bottle? That seemed impossible, but it was true. A few years before I arrived, Schneider started making alkoholfrei beer (nonalcoholic), and they had to install conditioning tanks to make it. For the 14 decades the Schneiders have made beer, they’d never owned tanks or had a reason to.
Speise is a specially prepared wort that brewers add to the finished beer to keep feeding the yeast cells so they create a lively burst of effervescence, critical to rousing fluffy heads. (At 3.5 volumes, Schneider Weisse is about 40 percent more lively than a standard beer.)
Weizenbock is a strong or “starkbier,” which makes it stand out from the eminently sessionable family of standard weissbiers. But aside from its strength and what that does to flavors it contains, weizenbock does not require special techniques—beyond those used to make any weissbiers. When I later wrote The Secrets of Master Brewers and asked Drexler to provide a standard weissbier recipe, he said it was easy to turn it into a weizenbock by using the same formulation and ingredients—just at a higher gravity.
After we’d finished the tour, I mentioned how surprised I’d been by the brewery. I didn’t expect it to be so unusual. That was the way of weissbier, he agreed.
“For me, wheat beer is terrible to produce,” he said. “There are so many screws you have to turn. It’s crazy. And these open fermentors are very hard to control. But the result is amazing if everything works perfectly.”