In the summer of 1985, matters had become dire at the second-oldest microbrewery in Portland, Oregon.
The Widmer brothers had founded their brewery on the bet that what the city’s drinkers wanted was a hoppy altbier. Elder brother Kurt had spent time apprenticing at Uerige in Düsseldorf, to learn how to make it, and he and brother Rob refined that beer—and only that beer—back home. Five months after they opened the doors of their small, makeshift brewery, however, they were discovering that… it may not have been such a hot bet.
Widmer Brothers was weeks from bankruptcy, and Rob and Kurt were brewing just twice a month. Nobody wanted a bitter, brown ale of a type they’d never heard of. To save the brewery, the brothers needed to switch gears, so they turned to one of Kurt’s old homebrew recipes—a wheat ale he called “Weizenbier.”
The Widmers weren’t the only ones making wheat ales. Anchor made the first modern example a couple of years earlier, and Pyramid made one the same year. But those beers didn’t land like the Widmers’ did. Their unfiltered wheat beer would become the first bona fide hit of the craft era in the Pacific Northwest—within five years, nearly every brewery in Oregon and Washington was making one. And it wasn’t only there: A few years later, a wave of breweries making wheat beers in the Midwest would also make it one of the most popular styles in that region.
Though they’ve enjoyed an enduring popularity, American wheat ales are far removed from the 2026 zeitgeist. They’re mild in flavor—a familiar if wispy kind of beer that slakes summer thirst without provoking a lot of deep contemplation. They can be wonderful little beers—they’re just not showy. Yet there’s a good case to be made that wheat ales were the first truly American beer style made in the craft era—American pale ales, after all, were riffing on a British tradition.
Starting with wheat as an ingredient rather than a tradition, breweries intuitively found their way to a similar kind of beer whether they were making it in Kalama or Kalamazoo. Drinkers also found it intuitive: It was familiar enough to pass for beer but different enough to seem daring—a perfect envoy for the early craft era. (The slice of lemon or orange that often appeared atop the glass didn’t hurt the style’s mainstream appeal, either.)
We don’t give American wheats a lot of respect today, but perhaps we should. They were one of the few styles Americans brewed that weren’t based on imitation, and they represented an authentically new kind of beer. More importantly, the style wasn’t an evolutionary dead end like many of the beers of the era; American wheat is still very much a piece of the current tradition.
The Hazy German-American Connection
Americans have been making wheat beers for more than a century, but in the 1800s most examples cast back to the beers of Bavaria and, especially, Berlin.
This makes sense: The first great brewing boom in the United States arrived with the wave of German immigrants from the 1840s on. When we think of German wheat beers today, our minds turn to Bavaria—but in the 19th century, Berlin’s tart weissbier was ascendant. Brewing journals from the 19th century document these beers, which were a small but consistent portion of the country’s output. As the new century approached, they began to lose their connection to Berlin and evolved into lighter, lager-like ales lightened with corn grits. They didn’t inspire great affection, either: “Undoubtedly, the American article could be improved upon,” wrote the chemists Wahl and Henius in 1902. The beers appear to have faded from the scene even before Prohibition.
By the 1980s, Bavarian weissbier had recovered in popularity in Germany, and was well known to Americans who had a connection to Germany. Anyone familiar with cloudy Bavarian wheat beer must have been confused by the new American examples, which may have looked the part but lacked the characteristic yeast-driven flavors of banana and clove. It didn’t help that many breweries followed the Widmers’ lead and called these beers by the German name, “hefeweizen.”
I’ve always wondered whether the Widmer brothers would choose a different name if they had a chance to do it all over again, but it’s academic now. In choosing Hefeweizen for their flagship, they explicitly evoked Bavaria’s wheat beers. The unfortunate result was that discerning drinkers dismissed American “hefeweizens” for what they lacked rather than appreciating what they contained.
Speaking to Eric Asimov of The New York Times in 2006, an indignant Garrett Oliver expressed the common view. The Widmers, he said, were “trading on the good name of an actual, established style to sell something different.”
It was a charge that haunted the brewery for years. But what if the critics had looked closer? They might have seen that behind the maladroit name, there was a pretty cool beer waiting to be enjoyed.
Think of Them as Wheaty Pale Ales
Despite the name and Kurt’s knowledge of German brewing, what’s striking about the original recipe for Widmer Hefeweizen is how American it is. Widmer Brothers made the beer with 45 percent wheat, filling it out with American two-row and 5 percent crystal. That was how many American brewers built their recipes then: neutral two-row plus some specialty malts added for color and flavor. That caramel malt is a little wink from an earlier age.
The hop schedule is especially American. The beer used U.S.-grown Tettnang and Cascade, with two bittering additions, but then one late addition just before flameout and, amazingly, a whirlpool addition—or “hop jack,” as they called it at the time. The brothers intended for the beer to be low in bitterness—the target listed on the recipe was 12 to 18 IBUs—but it ended up twice as bitter, settling in at 30 IBUs. Kurt used a pretty classic German step mash—that’s what he’d learned in Germany—and they ultimately simplified it.
In the end, the beer had almost nothing in common with German weissbier. It had a lightly wheaty palate, no clove or banana, and a noticeable citrus kiss from Oregon hops. It was basically a wheaty pale ale.
Writing in 1994, Michael Jackson praised Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen, saying it “tastes somewhere between a beer and a fresh, sweetish grapefruit juice, but deserves points for that curious distinction.” Anyone reading that today would recognize it as a pretty good generic description for a pale ale in the C-hop era.
American Terroir, American Process
Most people wouldn’t immediately associate the Pacific Northwest with wheat, even though all three states in the region are top-10 producers. Instead, they probably think of the Midwest, with its vast, golden fields undulating under the summer sun.
No surprise, then, that a separate and surprisingly similar tradition of wheat brewing emerged there in the early 1990s. And while the Northwest has mostly replaced its tradition of wheat beer with hoppy ales and crisp lagers, the style remains popular in the Heartland.
One of the more famous wheat ales first appeared in 1992, when Michigan’s Bell’s—then officially still known as Kalamazoo Brewing—released its Solsun wheat ale to celebrate baseball spring training. Bell’s Oberon later became an unlikely buzz beer across the Midwest, its popularity bubbling up years after the original launch. Capitalizing on that popularity, the brewery created Oberon Day, releasing a new vintage every year around the spring equinox. Originally inspired by Belgian saison, Oberon is a slightly stronger wheat ale (5.8 percent ABV), but it otherwise features the classic contours of the style. It gets Bell’s house ale yeast and 26 IBUs of citrus-forward hopping.
Other important Midwestern wheat beers include Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat; the Kansas City brewery released it in 1990, beating Kalamazoo’s by a couple of years. Goose Island’s 312 Wheat, meanwhile, didn’t appear until 2004. Appearing that same year was another popular regional standard, Three Floyds Gumballhead—a hopped-up take out of Munster, Indiana, fusing wheat beer with pale ale. Dry hopped and these days listed at 38 IBUs, Gumballhead predated hazy pale ale—often made with plenty of wheat—by several years. Today, Three Floyds markets it as an “American wheat pale ale.”
Writing in his 2010 book Brewing with Wheat, Stan Hieronymus elicits Gumballhead’s initial inspiration from founder Nick Floyd: “Most American wheat beer is boring,” he tells Stan. Floyd brewed Gumballhead to show that “American wheat beer doesn’t suck,” adding more American hops to enliven it.
American Classics
These Style School columns usually trace a story of evolution and include modern interpretations currently shining in the marketplace. Yet one of the more notable features of American wheats is how little they’ve changed.
Unlike most styles, they’re not really process beers. They’re made simply to drink simply, starting with a grist of 40 to 50 percent wheat—malted, but sometimes with a portion of unmalted—hopping that’s usually subtle, and a clean-fermenting ale yeast. Some shimmer with light haze, while others are as cloudy as a double dry-hopped hazy. They haven’t evolved much because they haven’t needed to.
For decades, American wheat ales suffered because people judged them for what they weren’t. Several years back, I was judging the finals of a category of traditional American styles at the Oregon Beer Awards. As we began to discuss the beers, one judge put a sample forward and said, “Can we just agree this is the best beer on the table?”
He talked about how well made it was, how precisely brewed and yet so approachable and delicious. We didn’t know who brewed it at the time, but we knew one thing: It was an American wheat, and stripped of all those preconceptions, it was a serious banger. We gave it the gold.
