Erdinger

The foam arrives first: a weissbier pour that fills half the tall glass with dense white mousse before the hazy gold beer catches up. Erdinger is Bavaria's great wheat-beer ambassador — a brewery in Erding, near Munich, that built its entire name on weissbier and ships it further than almost anyone else in the style.

It began in 1886 in Erding and remains privately owned; the company's full legal name — Privatbrauerei Erdinger Weißbräu Werner Brombach — still carries the owner's own name. Tradition governs the product — the weissbier ferments a second time in the bottle, which is why it pours so lively and why the yeast haze is part of the deal rather than a flaw.

The strangest chapter of its success is Erdinger Alkoholfrei, the non-alcoholic version that German athletes adopted as a recovery drink; it gets handed out at marathon and triathlon finish lines, making Erdinger perhaps the only Bavarian brewery whose beer is a fixture of endurance sport. From Erding, the brand now reaches across Europe, Asia, and North America.

Hazy honey-gold under an extravagant white head. The yeast does the talking: banana and clove on the nose, a soft pillowy wheat body, a gentle carbonation prickle, and almost no bitterness before a lightly sweet, bready fade. Drink it from the proper vase-shaped glass — the foam is half the experience.