2011 Beer Review #9: Bee Creek Hoosier Honey Wheat

After a Christmas/New Year's filled with presents of delicious beer, I finally ran out of gift beers and found myself perusing the selection at a local liquor store. I was encouraged to see that I haven't even come close to sampling all the many varieties available--it's a long year, after all, and I want to keep finding new beers for as long as I can. But when I saw the label for Bee Creek's Hoosier Honey Wheat featuring an adorable cartoon alcoholic bee, I knew I'd made my choice. Local brewery with local ingredients--that's socially responsible drinking!

So I took a 6-pack home with me and poured myself a glass. The beer has a nice clear golden color and a definite honey aroma. A lot of sweetness in the air as well--even from just smelling it, I can tell this is from both the malt and the honey. Sure enough, the first taste is very sweet. I'm not terribly experienced in either drinking or making craft beer, but I'm already second-guessing the brewmaster: Isn't this beer malty enough without adding the straight-up sweetness of honey?

It's not a bad beer by any means, but it's very, very sweet. And I've got five more of these things to plow through before I can justify getting something new. Still, I'm drinking for science--if I'm going to continue to seek out new beers and new breweries, I'll just have to drink these overly sweet beers and get over it. So I grabbed another bottle and had a drink. And this time, it wasn't nearly as sweet. It was much smoother and more complex right from the bottle. What?

And here's where I've learned something about beer drinking. See, the first bottle got poured into a pilsner glass, which has a much wider opening than a standard bottle. That wider opening allows the beer to "breathe" better, giving off a stronger aroma. So when I drank out of that glass, I was smelling the beer as much as I was tasting it, which apparently concentrated the beer's sweetness and made the whole thing come off as cloying. Drinking out of the bottle, I couldn't smell it as much, so I could get the other flavors present in the beer. For the record? Mostly banana.

So I ended up glad I bought a full six-pack, because otherwise I would have written off the Hoosier Honey Wheat as cloying and obnoxious. No matter how you drink it, it might be too sweet for your liking. Still, it's got enough going on that I'd be willing to give the rest of the Bee Creek lineup a taste sometime.