Wheaties is wheat cereal. Hefeweizen is wheat beer. Now, General Mills has done the inevitable and created a Wheaties-branded Hefeweizen in partnership with Minneapolis craft brewery Fulton.
"We were intrigued from the get-go on this idea for many reasons, including that we're both Minneapolis companies, and that the beer and the cereal both started from the same place in terms of raw ingredients and the same city," Fulton president and co-founder Ryan Petz says in this General Mills blog post.
"We had been sampling a number of Hefeweizens, so we had been discussing with the Wheaties team what we liked," says Petz. "Someone on the team said HefeWheaties, and it kind of sprung out from there."
Everything from the recipe to the can design was a collaboration, which came about simply because some General Mills employees are friends with some of the folks at Fulton. (Petz even worked at General Mills for a while.)
At least for now, you'll have to travel to Minnesota to sample the stuff. Beginning Aug. 26, it will be available in the Twin Cities market in four-pack cans of 16-ounce tallboys. It won't be available for shipment or purchase outside Minnesota.
"We'll see how people react to it," says Petz. "If it's something everybody loves, we'll obviously consider doing it again in a bigger and more widely distributed way in the future."