Wheat has a branding problem.
For most drinkers—and more than a few brewers—wheat still looks more like a style marker than a useful ingredient. It suggests banana and clove, cloudy appearance, maybe a slice of lemon or orange on the rim. (I always wonder whether the bartender is mad at me for immediately losing it.)
The mind interrogates the word and starts making assumptions, and before you know it, we’re thinking about wheat beer instead of wheat. Once an ingredient gets boxed into a style category, it’s easy to stop thinking critically about what it does for beer.
That’s ironic because wheat is now embedded in more of today’s most popular beers than ever, often in styles that make no mention of its presence. Hazy IPA, West Coast IPA, and pale lager—the three most dominant craft styles right now—all often include some wheat, in some form. It shows up quietly in pale ale, saison, Kölsch, mixed-culture beer, and even stout. There are versions of it used for color (hello, Midnight Wheat), head formation and retention (flaked wheat), and more.
Most of the time, though, no one talks about wheat unless it’s in a “wheat beer.” Even if brewers know it’s there, wheat is flying stealth in many of this era’s most popular beers.
That wider silence on what wheat is and its virtues has consequences for us as brewers. We often add wheat reflexively, it seems. We add it because a recipe template calls for it, because someone heard it helps foam, because it’s “what you do” in hazy beer.
But wheat is not neutral filler. It has specific flavor, mouthfeel, recipe, and process impacts—and we’re in the best position to succeed when we use it with purpose. At its best, wheat is one of the most useful grains in the modern brewery.
So, here we’ll consider wheat on its own terms—where and how we can use it, including some tips and tricks from top pros on how this quiet ingredient can help us make better beer.
Wheat as a Functional Grain
From a brewer’s perspective, wheat is a winner.
It has robust extract potential, contributes proteins that improve head retention, and it (usually) integrates cleanly into the mash. That alone explains why it appears in so many recipes that never advertise it on the label. Wheat also works as a base grain or as any of a wide variety of specialty grains—in that sense, it’s as versatile as barley.
In beers where wheat is front and center—say, upward of half of the grist—there tend to be flavors we recognize as “wheaty.”
Blake Tyers, cofounder and senior curiosity director at Creature Comforts in Atlanta, says wheat can contribute those good, grainy flavors in either its malted or raw forms. “We may use … up to 40 percent of the grist in one of our wheat-forward beers like a Berliner weisse,” he says. “In the Berliner weisse application, I think our wheat brings a really nice base flavor.”
At Grimm Artisanal Ales in Brooklyn, New York, the Grimm Weisse gets 50 percent wheat malt. “To get a noteworthy wheaty flavor, you have to use a lot of it,” says cofounder and brewer Joe Grimm. At that level, wheat expresses a gently tart and lemony character that’s impossible to miss.
Of course, those are wheat beers, driven by ample wheat flavor. It’s a wonderful flavor, but wheat’s contributions don’t end there.
Malted wheat, Grimm says, is “functionally similar to malted barley in many ways,” but it has one meaningful advantage over other foam-enhancing malts: efficiency. Grimm, whose brewery is highly regarded for its hazy IPAs, says he frequently uses small amounts of wheat malt or chit malt across their lineup, specifically to reinforce foam. However, wheat offers better extract than chit, making it the more economical and versatile option. That alone makes wheat attractive—you’re not sacrificing yield to improve presentation. Instead, you’re stacking benefits.
Yet wheat’s various forms as a brewing ingredient—chiefly malted, flaked, and raw, though there are others—all behave differently. Grimm says they primarily use malted wheat, but the brewery occasionally turns to flaked or raw wheat—often for color. Unmalted wheat produces a lighter-colored wort, and that can be useful in those pale hazies that seem to shine in the sun.
Tyers says that the Creature Comforts team found raw wheat to be less of a headache than expected. “We met the folks at DaySpring Farms, an organic wheat farm about 20 miles from our brewery, and tried out using their raw wheat in one of our recipes,” he says. “At first, we were a bit worried about using raw wheat and our ability to cereal cook, but [we] learned the gelatinization temp of wheat is in the range of a normal mash and found no issues.”
Most modern beers use wheat sparingly—it may be there in the 5 to 15 percent range, its influence more architectural than overt. That doesn’t mean it’s trivial. That just means its effects are cumulative and interactive.
At 10 percent of the grist, wheat won’t scream “wheat,” but it will subtly affect mouthfeel, foam, the perception of acidity, and how hops present on the palate. In other words, it shapes the beer we taste, even if you wouldn’t identify that beer as wheat-driven.
As with any useful tool, there are trade-offs—for example, both raw and flaked wheat contribute viscosity and require more attention to the mash, even as they contribute no helpful enzymes. Wheat rewards planning, and that’s another kind of benefit: Anything that gets us to slow down and make intentional choices is helpful because we should be doing that anyway.
Feelings, Flavors, and Foam
Wheat expresses itself in many distinct ways across several sensory areas, but especially in mouthfeel, flavor, and appearance.
Starting with the obvious: Yes, wheat contributes to texture.
“Wheat is a high-protein grain, like oats,” Tyers says, but “their effects on mouthfeel are a bit different.” He says he interprets oats as having a creaminess that kind of “hugs” the palate, while wheat creates a fluffiness that enriches mouthfeel but sits lighter. “A combination of both is something I really enjoy in our stouts.”
We also tend to think of wheat as a foam-builder, and many breweries—including Creature Comforts—use it in that role.
But these go-to applications aren’t the whole story. Wheat also interacts with our other ingredients to produce unique flavors and perceptions. For example: Tyers says wheat is often a good complement to other mouthfeel-specific grist choices (such as oats).
In saison, weissbier, and some mixed-culture beers, wheat also serves as an important source of ferulic acid—a precursor to 4-vinyl guaiacol, the clove-like compound produced by phenolic yeast strains. Including a ferulic-acid rest in the mash allows us to actively shape how those phenols present, rather than leaving the outcome entirely to yeast genetics and fermentation conditions. Even in beers that don’t scan as “wheat beers,” that interaction can matter, particularly when working with expressive yeast.
Grimm shares an especially illuminating insight on flavor and interactivity from a dry-hopped experiment gone sideways. After brewing an IPA with their hefeweizen wort, the brewery noticed a drastically different hop character—it was more bracing, more tannic, and far drier than expected. The beer wasn’t flawed, but it wasn’t balanced.
Grimm attributes that outcome to the interaction between hop-derived and wheat-derived polyphenols, which together intensified astringency. High levels of wheat, he says, can contribute a drying mouthfeel that works in some contexts but quickly becomes overwhelming in others.
That’s a critical takeaway for modern IPA brewers: Wheat can make a beer feel soft and fluffy, but it can also trigger structured, aggressive flavors that can be hard to drink. In Grimm’s view, out-of-balance astringency is one of the most common flaws in hazy IPA, often mistaken for “boldness” when it’s actually fatigue. His recommendation is blunt: Brew an IPA with 50 percent wheat at least once—not because it will be your best beer, but because it will teach you what wheat really does in that context.
The broader lesson is that wheat doesn’t just affect foam and mouthfeel: It contributes to the flavors we get in the finished beer, both by influencing fermentation and by changing the expression of our other ingredients. To ignore that is to miss the full picture.
A Matter of Style
Wheat’s role will vary by style, but perhaps nowhere is wheat more ubiquitous or misunderstood than in hazy IPA.
At Grimm Artisanal Ales, wheat is typically about 10 to 15 percent of the grist in a New England–style IPA. At that range, it’s pulling multiple levers at once: improving extract efficiency, reinforcing foam, contributing a subtle tart-citrus note, and acting as a minor haze contributor. However, Grimm is careful to dismantle one of the most persistent myths about the style: that the haze itself is driven primarily by wheat or oats.
“The desirable kind of milky haze in NEIPA,” Grimm says, “should be driven by dry hopping with T-90s in a beer that was fermented by specific yeast strains.”
Wheat plays a supporting role; it is not the star. In fact, you can make excellent hazy pale ales and IPAs with 100 percent barley. That distinction matters because it reframes wheat as a supporting ingredient rather than a shortcut. If you’re relying on wheat to do some heavy lifting to compensate for yeast choice, hop selection, or fermentation management, your beer is already in trouble.
Hazies aren’t the only IPAs that use wheat, however—the grain is making a quiet resurgence in West Coast–leaning IPA. As brewers pull those beers back toward softer bitterness, brighter hop aroma, and better foam stability—without sacrificing clarity—wheat has become a useful tool. Small additions can support head retention and mouthfeel while avoiding the sweetness or fullness associated with crystal malt. That means we can use wheat effectively, with restraint, in West Coast IPAs that want snap and precision, not plushness.
Pale lager may be the least-discussed context for wheat, but it’s arguably the most revealing. In these beers, also, wheat is less about flavor and more about its other contributions—foam and a softness of texture. A few percentage points of wheat in the grist can improve head retention dramatically, improving visual appeal and tactile presence without altering the lager’s clean profile.
Here, wheat functions almost like a brewing insurance policy: It makes the beer look and feel better without making it taste all that different. That may not be romantic, but it’s effective, and it’s one reason you’ll also see meaningful additions of wheat in other lagers, including bocks.
Don’t Get Stuck
For all its benefits, wheat extracts a cost, and that cost is most often paid in exactly one place: the mash tun.
Wheat has no husks. The addition of rice hulls is a common solution, and that’s what they do at Creature Comforts. “The huskless nature of wheat can create some sticky lauters if we aren’t paying attention.” Without that built-in filter bed, high-wheat grists are more prone to compaction, slow runoff, and stuck sparges. It’s the most common operational complaint associated with wheat, and it’s entirely predictable.
Grimm shares another practical tip: If high wheat proportions are causing problems, beta-glucanase enzyme in the mash can help improve lautering efficiency.
For the homebrewer, meanwhile, a pound of rice hulls per 10 pounds of grain—if you have anything like half the grist in wheat—is a simple rule of thumb that will save a lot of headaches.
Wheat as an Intentional Choice
The throughline in all of this is intention.
Wheat isn’t a gimmick. It’s not a haze-generator. And it’s not just a nod to tradition.
Wheat is a structurally important, chemically active brewing grain that adds subtle—but positive—elements to a range of styles. That quiet utility is exactly why wheat has become so prevalent in modern beer styles.
Brewers use wheat because it solves problems: foam stability, extract efficiency, mouthfeel, fermentation expression. In a brewing landscape increasingly focused on precision, balance, and drinkability, that makes it one of the most underrated tools in the brewhouse.
And perhaps the clearest sign of wheat’s modern relevance is this: Some of the most “not wheat beer” beers being made today wouldn’t be the same without it.
