100 Beers, 100 Days: Day #33

Julius Echter Hefe-Weiss-Dunkel

The style of tonight’s beer requires a bit of explanation first. Most people know hefeweizens as very light colored, lightly flavored beers. They’re usually straw or almost white in color, depending on which region you get it from. However there’s another kind of wheat beer called the dunkelweizen, meaning dark wheat. These are much darker and more flavorful. There are some truly outstanding ones out there if you know what to look for. Even though I’ve only made one batch of my dunkelweizen (for the BBBQ several years back), I’d say it was one of my favorites.

Tonight’s beer also doesn’t appear to have a website, at least not that I could find with a quick bit of searching.

The Julius Echter dunkelweizen is a medium brown in color with a white head. That’s a little unusual. I would have expected more of a tan or off-white head, but no matter. It fades quite slowly as you might expect from a hefeweizen. They’re known for not wanting to stay in the glass. Approaching the beer, you get a hint of chocolate and toffee. The taste is much the same - chocolate and roasted malts and a little bit of nuttiness. It’s a very smooth beer with almost no hops either in the aroma or flavor. It was a very good beer though I would have wanted it to be darker and a little more assertively flavored. I think I like the Ayinger dunkelweizen more, but Julius Echter is a solid beer. I would drink it again.