Heft A Hefeweizen In The Chronicle
I love it when an editor assigns me a topic I don't know much about and asks me to research it. I like to learn, and that type of piece gives me an excuse to explore something outside my ken. A few weeks ago, if you had asked me about hefeweizen, I would have told you that I like it, and I might have remembered that it's made with wheat. After researching and writing a piece about it for today's Chronicle, I can distinguish between the different styles—turns out I prefer Germans—and display a degree of knowledge on the topic. My favorite in the last couple of weeks comes from Weihenstephan.
The word hefeweizen had some amusing side effects. First, the phonetic wordplay possibilities besieged my idle thoughts. Have, half, huff, wise, wizened, vise, ice. For a few days while I wrote the piece, my AIM status message said, "half of ice inn." I restrained myself in the final draft, but it was a tough battle.
Second, the word threw a hurdle in my writing path. I run Word's readability statistics two or three times near the end of my work on a draft. I'm not dogmatic about it, but I strive for nine or below—easy reading for high school grads—and I'm ecstatic when I get below eight. But you pay a high penalty in those calculations for higher numbers of syllables per word: You can guess what a page of hefeweizens does to the score. (The final text, which is all but the same as my final draft, scores an 8.9.)
But who cares about all that? Go read my piece and pop open a hefeweizen—or a hefeweissbier, or a witbier, or an American wheat beer—to sip in the summer heat. Just think how good one would taste as you wait in line for your iPhone.
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