Thank you for giving me this beer, Matt.  I really do appreciate trying a new beer, even if I don’t like it.  Unfortunately, I have to say this about Leinenkugel’s Berry Weiss.  They do have some other beers that I like much better than this one (their Oktoberfest is an example).  Here is a review of the beer.

The beer looked hazy like many wheat beers do, but it did have a reddish tint from the berry juices that were added to it.  Head retention was not long but also not absent. 

There was little hop aroma, which is also common among wheat beers.  The yeast and grains came through on the nose of the beer, but berry was the overwhelming aroma on this Berry Weiss.  Beyond this there was very little going on.  

What I really want to talk about is the tastes of the brew.  I felt that there were very little wheat qualities to the beer because is was drastically overwhelmed by the fruit juices.  The beer has a sweetness and slight tartness because of the berries and (I suppose) honey.  Leinenkugel is to beer what Ludens is to cough drops…it really didn’t do anything for me despite its sweetness.  Drinking the beer was like drinking a Lambic without the complexity, dry tartness, or peppery finish.  

This beer has enormous potential.  I think that integrating the berries into the fermentation rather than added as flavoring would solve a lot of the problems.  The cloying taste of the beer would turn into a nice, dry and well-attenuated consumable.  To counter the extra alcohol from fermenting the berries, the brewers could add more wheat and a healthy dose of yeast.  Either way, the berry flavoring was just too much.  Besides, who can’t add flavors to a finished beer at their house?  It is the brewer’s job to find a good way to get those berries into the beer with good results; this was not the case with Leinenkugel’s.