Quick, picture yourself sitting on a patio nursing a beer as the warm summer sun kisses your skin.
What type of beer are you drinking?
While there are a number of solid options, ranging from a crisp Pilsner to a fruity saison, odds are you thought of a hefeweizen.
That’s because the German unfiltered wheat beer style, with its banana and clove notes, poured into a traditional half-liter vaselike weizen glass, in many ways is the quintessential drink for whittling away the hours under the sun.
And it was while nursing a cold hefeweizen on a summer’s evening that inspiration struck Liz Cooper, a distiller at North Shore Distillery.
Cooper, the first employee Sonja and Derek Kassebaum, the husband-and-wife owners of North Shore, ever hired, took inspiration from the hefeweizen style for SommerWeizen, which is this year’s one-off, single-batch offering from the Lake Bluff distillery.
Each year, North Shore produces about 800 bottles of a spirit that is unlike anything else on the market (previous year’s spirits have included an elder gin liqueur and a take on a bottled Corpse Reviver No.2 cocktail).
Rather than distill a beer, like Chicago distillery Koval has done when producing a bierbrand collaboration with Metropolitan Brewing, Cooper and her colleagues sought to reproduce the flavors common to hefeweizen and present those elements in an entirely different way, says Sonja Kassebaum. “We wanted to create something entirely unique,” she says.
And it is. While Kassebaum is coy about sharing the exact ingredients, she notes that the spirit is a blend of a wheat whiskey and a neutral spirit.
Crafting SommerWeizen was a multistep process, she says, that involved layering flavors by infusing and distilling bananas and citrus fruits, along with two types of aromatic hops and spices such as clove and coriander. The result is a complex, slightly sweet spirit with bright banana notes and a hint of spice.
It is interesting enough to sip on its own, with a single ice cube or with a splash of club soda if you want carbonation.
Or you can sub it for vodka in simple cocktails like a Moscow Mule.
Sommer mule
2 ounces SommerWeizen
1/2 a lime
Ginger beer
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Press the lime half into a tall glass, then drop the spent lime into the glass. Add 2 ounces SommerWeizen and ice, top with ginger beer. Stir briefly and garnish with a lime wedge.