The juice (juice?) balances with hefeweizen, a type of beer typically in dire need of an outside fruit to punch it up. This guy is exceptionally drinkable the pineapple is present throughout but never overpowering or sickly artificial/sweet. The carbonation isn’t as overwhelming as in a hard seltzer or any of the other summer drinks I’ve been plied with this June (not complaining!) but works well to create a clean flavor with a light aftertaste. It tastes just like it smells the hefeweizen works great with the fruit-adjacent beverage. Fortunately, once you get it in a glass it fizzes up and gives off a sweet pineapple scent. The smell from the bottle is strong and a little skunky. It billed in my PR email as a 50/50 combo of real German hefeweizen & pineapple juice, but the label promises “pineapple flavored drink.” This is a phrase that concerns me, but pineapple is an underrated mixer that typically makes most boozes better. This is the flavor that spurred my sample.
Schöfferhofer sent me a lovely bouquet of these beer/soft drink mixes for a taste test. While it doesn’t say “radler” anywhere on the bottle/can, the description makes it clear this is a beer/”flavored drink” mix and, since it checks in at 2.5 percent ABV and is German well, yep, that’s a radler. This left a high bar for Schöfferhofer to clear. Then I went to Scotland and had the same exact damn problem courtesy of whiskey because I. I rode that horse all the way through the rest of my vacation in Germany. This was a wonderful decision, as the helles/lemon-lime tincture not only restored my ability to form (mostly) coherent sentences but also created a calm port inside a stormy stomach tossed by marzens and a diet made up entirely of sausage, sauerkraut, and doner kebab. My brain, polluted by a mother who’d grown up poor and simultaneously respecting the restorative “hair of the dog” wisdom passed down to me by an older cousin who only drank liquor from plastic bottles, opted for these hybrids in hopes of nursing my body back to half-speed. Roughly six days in and in desperate need of hydration, I turned to the half-beer, half-soda mix that’s roughly one Euro more per liter than a Diet Coke on its own. This left me sorely lacking in radler knowledge, however, until I made the trip out to Munich for Oktoberfest. I remain bitter that for several years I could get an orange shandy (terrible) but couldn’t find Sunset Wheat anywhere (it is, fortunately, coming back this fall).
What started out with lemon has now expanded to roughly a dozen flavors, of which maybe three are any good. This is thanks largely to the constant presence of Leinenkugel’s flagship beer in the Badger State. Living in Wisconsin has made me intimately familiar with shandies, the beer-lemonade (or other fruit-based beverage) mix that permeates the summer.
Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Previously, we’ve folded these in to our betting guides, whether that’s been for the NFL slate or a bizarrely successful run through the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series.
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