Superlative Wheat Bier

The past two nights I have had a Bavarian wheat beer (weissbier). Wednesday's was so delicious, so absolutely lip-smacking / 'here's a key, you can come and go as you please', that Thursday I again bought a German wheat beer.But it didn't measure up to the first, the first being the wheat beer from the oldest continuously operated brewery in the world: Weihenstephaner.

I rate Weihenstephaner Hefe Weissbier to be off the charts, superlative. It turns out that RateBeer.com's collective wisdom agrees, giving it a 99/100 score.

The beer I had Thursday wasn't over-the-top great, but was a tasty approximation. Plus, the bottle was 12 ounces instead of 11.2 of the Weihenstephaner. It was the Franziskaner Weissbier. Again, I'm in agreement with RateBeer, which scored it a 96/100.

There you have it: 2 excellent beers from Munich, the beer capital of the world. Why is Weihenstephaner's better? That is a question for another post.

You Only Have to be 16 to ...

You don't have to declare you are 21 years old to drink  the websites of foreign beer brewers. The first screening question is language, so the text can be understood. The brewers do not ask you to first declare your home country, which might lead them to ask you to pass the minimum age of such country. They instead use their local laws as the benchmark.

No matter where you're from, you need only be 18 to enter the self-declared oldest brewery in the world: Weihenstephaner from Bavaria, Germany. A competing Bavarian brewer, Weltenburger Abbey, also claims to be the oldest brewery in the world. When I visited their website I learned that I only had to be 16 years old to enter!

It remains in dispute which of the two Bavarian brewers named above is the oldest brewery, but we have learned that Weihenstephaner has the older age requirement to consume its website.

Which of these 2 brewers has an older web site? According to the Wayback Machine, Weihenstephaner wins that honor as well, having been crawled way back in Dec 1998. Weltenburger was right on its heels, with a website from Jan 1999.