Your average lemur makes a terrible manservant. Don't ever waste a summer trying. It takes them forever to drag a beer from one room to the next, and you'd think they have dexterous little hands, but I found their laundry folding skills to be incredibly sub-par. Exotic animal friends can be both time consuming and delicious, but a Cornish game hen provides the latter with no need of training or a wee tuxedo. Unless well-dressed poultry is your thing, you monster. But let's put aside whatever predilections you have for Capon in chapeau and return to our subject, shall we? 

In the upper midwest (where the men are men and the women are frozen to something) sits Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has an area of 45.3 sq. mi., is home to the Frederick Meijer Gardens, the DeVos Place Convention Center and many other places you've read about both here and on Wikipedia if you've never been to the place and need something to write about it in your beer column. TRANSITION It is also home to Founders Brewing Company, one of the more significant craft breweries in the United States, at the northeast side of which you can spy Connecticut, where Founders beers can now be, um... found. 

Sorry for the delay, all, it took me two weeks to track down any of the new Sixpoint beers south of Fairfield, but they do seem to be propagating through liquor stores and brewpubs. Apollo was the first beer I picked up, since it is Sixpoint's summer seasonal this year, and I am an incurable geek about both space and Greek mythology. I was held helpless in this beer's sway even sitting on the shelf and, having run a few pints through my bloodstream, my slavish dedication hasn't lessened. 

Apollo gives off a brilliant aroma of yeasts and Bavarian wheat. Its color scores a 3.7 on the Standard Reference Method scale (or SRM; in this case straw colored, tending towards pale gold), a unit of measure especially useful when printed on the outside of opaque cans. Its unusual clarity (for a hefeweizen) is a result of the the beer being put through a centrifuge before canning, allowing it to keep the flavor and body, but with fewer solids.