A pint of Wheaties beer?

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Is there a beer-drinker anywhere who has not, at some point, pounded down a cold one before noon and burped, “Beer. Breakfast of champions”?

Probably there is, beer having been turned into a kind of sacramental beverage by the craft-brewing movement. But still, the news that General Mills Co. is collaborating on a Wheaties-based beer seems like an unfortunate progression.

Beer requires fermented grain. Usually it’s malted barley, corn or rice, but sometimes it’s malted wheat and the result is a Hefeweizen (German for yeastwheat). Wheaties has wheat. Inevitably a craft brewer was going to go there.

It was the Fulton Brewery, (“Ordinary guys brewing extraordinary beer”) of Minneapolis that persuaded General Mills to let it brew up some “Hefe-Wheaties.” .

For General Mills, it’s a no-lose proposition. Sales of Wheaties have been in decline for a decade.

So why not just pour your beer onto a bowl of Wheaties and be done with it? As singer Kris Kristofferson put it, “And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.”