Colaweizen fever: catch it!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
4:43 PM
I used to drink Colaweizen all the time before I graduated to Dunkelweizen, so there's a special place in my heart for that drink. Here's a great explanation loosely translated from a German beer cocktails website:
Colaweizen, also known as a Colahefe, Hefecola, Neger, Cab (Cola and Beer) or Mohren, is a mix of equal parts weissbier [i.e. weizen, usually hefeweizen] and coke. In Northern Germany the correct pour order is: first the coke, and then the weizen; otherwise the drink will foam. In Southern Germany the pour order is reversed, because a head is desired and the coke mixes better with the beer that way. In addition, usually far less coke is used (about 3/4 weizen to 1/4 coke, or even less). This gives the beer a wonderful, sweet head.
There are also some slight variations on this formula. A mix of coke and pilsener is called a Diesel, a mix of coke and kölsch is a Drecksack (literally "dirtbag"), and Schwarzbier and coke is a Griefswalder (after a town in NW Germany).
I've only had the Diesel, and I didn't really care for it. Germans also mix lemonade with different kinds of beer, to make what I'd call a shandy. It continues to bother me that Wikipedia thinks the Colaweizen is just another kind of "shandy".
And there are even stranger mixes: at the Freiburg "Monkey Jump," an annual bar-hopping event, I had a delicious Bananenweizen. Would you believe that it took me until now to figure out why they were serving those on that particular day?