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Beer Reviews

Copper Kettle Weiss

New Glarus Brewing Company
New Glarus, WI
USA
http://www.newglarusbrewing.com/

Style: Dunkelweizen
ABV: 6.0%

Eddie’s Rating:
   (Outstanding within its style.)


Comments:
Roughly 73 percent of the people who’ve watched me pour a beer from a bottle tell me I’m doing it wrong. The other 27 percent think I’m pouring it wrong but they’re kind enough to keep their damn yaps shut. I get my beer from bottle to glass by following the Randy Mosher school of thought: place the glass on the table and pour the beer right down the center of the glass. All the armchair pourers watching me usually gasp in horror and haughtily inform me that my barbaric pouring method produces too much head. “Don’t you know anything about beer!” they scream. Apparently, terrorism, mad cow disease, bird flu, nuclear war, public speaking and too much head on one’s beer are the average person’s most dreaded fears.

I’m not going to debate how to pour a beer in this review, but I will tell you that if you pour a beer like me and you want to try New Glarus’s Copper Kettle Weiss, you better have some time on your hands. An average pour will yield six good inches of thick-bubbled foam. And that’s just from pouring half the bottle. While it settles you can go milk the cows, then come back and pour the rest of the bottle in the glass. Be careful, though, because it might still overflow after all that, and it’d be a damn shame to waste a single drop of this fine beer.

The Copper Kettle is a dunkel weiss—a dark wheat beer—and is as authentic as anything you will ever run across in Bavaria. It pours a gorgeous hazy copper with the aforementioned massive head. Those in the know will tell you one of the main reasons to pour the way I do is that it really brings out the beer’s aroma. And this beer’s got distinctive aroma in spades. Imagine a typical Bavarian wheat’s banana/clove fruitiness mashed up with a healthy dose of caramel. It’s not as heavy body-wise as a few German dunkels out there, which only adds to the appeal—the fruit/caramel combo lingers throughout the sipping, with a chocolately effervescence on the end that gives you visions of a mad culinary scientist spiking a bottle of champagne with a shot of cacao. New Glarus has given us the perfect September beer: a refreshing fruitiness to remind us summer isn’t altogether dead yet, with a touch of darkness and body to let us know autumn is looming on the horizon. So next time you have loads of time to kill, grab a six-pack, pour, watch and enjoy. And when you’re pouring, be sure to tell all those beer-pouring experts where they can shove their advice. (In case you don’t know where that is, it’s right up the butt. Their butts, not yours.)

Reviewed by Eddie Glick on December 31, 2006.

Today in 1516, the Reinheitsgebot, or “German Beer Purity Law,” was adopted in Bavaria.

Drinkin’ And Thinkin’

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