Alkoholfrei

The beer

Spicy malt, a caramel-sweet edge, and the banana-and-clove smell of wheat beer. The nose is the style before it is anything else. It does not smell like a lager that has been sweetened, and it does not smell like banana flavoring.

The palate is rounder than most nonalcoholic lagers. Wheat gives it body. Hop bitterness is there, balanced by the malt sweetness rather than fighting it. It is off-dry, lightly fruity, and still bitter enough to taste like beer. The head, poured properly, is part of the drink: it carries the clove.

It closes clean and lightly fruity, the wheat-beer ending that reads as the style and not as a soda. Serve it cold, in a wheat-beer glass, with that head. Warm, the caramel sweetness gets ahead of the spice.

It is recognizably wheat beer. The malt and the yeast character survived. The fuller, slightly warming body of the alcoholic version is not in this glass. The spice and the sweetness are doing that work instead. Pour it with a proper head when you want banana, clove, and caramel malt, and stop there. Trust the clove ahead of the malt. Banana and clove should lead.