North Ridgeville's Finest: Mad Bee Honey Wheat

What luck - a sketched label with a bee, possibly a mad one if the beer's name tells us anything, hovering above a honeycomb. That it comes from Northeast Ohio helped it over the hump and into my basket. It only comes in bomber bottles, often a sign of a brewer producing ales a cut above the rest.

Mad Brewer gives a fresh take on honey wheat, a style that has grown increasingly bogged down by uninspired brews with the faintest touch of honey. Mad Bee doesn't demonstrate any half-measures - it's loaded with honey noise to finish. A slight bitterness runs through Mad Bee, but the honey softens it on the finish. The head is amazingly light, with the lace vanishing into a few islands seconds after pouring.

Purists can argue the heresy of unfiltered wheat ales, but the style has rapidly grown on me since sampling a few from Montana. For all the Belgian wit and German hefe-weizen I have downed, taking the cloudiness from a wheat ale presents it in a whole different fashion, one lighter but just as quenching and full of textures.

The honey positively shines here, transforming an average quaffer into a highly memorable ale. This might taste better in autumn, as the filtering results in different fruits than a standard wheat ale. I pick up apple, a tiny trace of dark berries, plus shades of ginger and some other spices.

Mad bee is a gateway brew to two styles - filtered wheat ale, and honey ale. For its great pedigree as the main ingredient in mead, honey gets the short shrift in modern beer, even among craft brewers. Fortunately, it never gets dated. Mad Bee isn't just a great starting point for those styles, but its entire brewery.