If you needed yet another reason to love Wisconsin, I’ve found one.

Last year, I had the good fortune of trying Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat. It’s a wheat beer that tastes of orange and coriander and is great for a hot summer day. It became my favorite beer of last summer, and I got most of my friends hooked on it as well.

I immediately did some research on the family-owned brewery based in Chippewa, Wisconsin, hoping that I could find out if they sold other varieties of their beer here. But I didn’t have any luck, that is, until now.

This past weekend on a "beer-finding" mission in Massachusetts, I literally stumbled across Leinenkugel’s Berry Weiss and Honey Weiss. Both are wheat beers sold year-round.

The Berry version includes loganberries, elderberries and blackberries. If you aren’t a big beer drinker and instead lean toward wine coolers, you may dig this. It is very sweet and fruity. If you are used to a porter or stout, or are an ale drinker, this may not be up your alley. Try it with some frozen berries at the bottom of the glass like I did for a sweet treat.

The Honey Weiss is what you think it is. It’s a Wheat Ale with Honey added. As opposed to the Berry, this is not very sweet and is close in profile to the Sunset Wheat.

And I haven’t tried this yet but I found out if you can’t decide, you can mix the Berry with the Honey to make a "Honey Bear" or mix the Sunset Wheat with the Berry for a "Sunny Bear."

The brewery makes several other beers including a seasonal, Summer Shandy, which the company bills as a lemonade flavored beer and Big Butt Dopplebock, a dark beer made with dark chocolate malt and sold January through March.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.