Carlos Antonio Rios/Houston Chronicle file The last batch of Texas Wheat was brewed Monday, as Saint Arnold has decided to discontinue the beer.



Saint Arnold Brewing Co. is dropping Texas Wheat, one of its original lineup of beers, and replacing it with a variation of its best-selling Fancy Lawnmower.

The last batch of Texas Wheat was brewed Monday and should be ready for packaging in about two weeks, bringing to close a nearly 17-year run for a beer that was called Kristall Weizen until it got a new name and a tweaked recipe in August 2005.

The first kegs of Weedwacker, a Kolsch-style beer fermented with a Bavarian hefeweizen yeast, will start to appear around May 15. Saint Arnold founder Brock Wagner said the draft version is being rushed to market to fill a looming but temporary void in Summer Pils caused by unexpectedly strong sales of the popular seasonal.



Early June will bring the release of 12-ounce bottles featuring the familiar Lawnmower labels but with weeds sprouting across the manicured lawn in the background and “Weedwacker” slapped over the original name.

Weedwacker debuted last summer as the first in Saint Arnold’s Movable Yeast series, in which the brewery takes familiar beers and ferments them with different yeasts to highlight the difference in taste made by this often unheralded ingredient.

It got a “big, big response” from consumers, Wagner said.

“Everybody loves it,” he said. “We loved it when we brewed it. … Weedwacker will be in my fridge.”

The move comes as Saint Arnold continues to grow at a blistering pace following its move into a new brewery near downtown a year ago. Sales set a record last month, up 75 percent over March 2010, Wagner said. That followed growth spurts of 40 percent in both January and February over the same months last year.

Sales of Texas Wheat had grown the past four years, but nowhere near as rapidly as the Houston brewery’s other beers. In 2010, for example, its total production of 771 barrels was less than half the amount of increase in Lawnmower production. The beer never made up more than 5 percent of sales, a brewery spokesman said.

Brown Ale, with production levels similar to Texas Wheat, will remain. Wagner explained that the company makes nothing comparable to Brown, while the addition of Weedwacker would mean a crowd of relatively lighter-bodied beers, such as Lawnmower, Summer Pils and Amber Ale.

Wagner was not sentimental about the demise of Texas Wheat, never a personal favorite.

“It was the one time we came up with something we thought would sell rather than a beer that I just wanted to make,” he said.

Still, it was not a decision made lightly. The last time Saint Arnold tweaked its core lineup of year-round beers was in March 2004, when it introduced Elissa India Pale Ale.

Join Beer, TX on Facebook at facebook.com/rcrocker.beertx or follow me on Twitter: @rcrocker