ADDING STUFF TO BEER, PT. 3
Hey there,
Welcome back! My apologies for the accidental week off - don’t tell my boss, or anyone who works at MacLeod for that matter, but I just discovered Breath of the Wild (on that topic - what a hell of a Hyrule Castle score, one of the series’ best, though, like the game itself, Wind Waker has it beat), and as such, took a bit of an accidental mini-vacation last week, particularly as concerned this peripheral duty. Forgive me!
In any case, we’re back this week for a double feature to make up for that dreadful lapse - an experimental beer meme post, and this final entry in the Adding Stuff to Beer series. We’ve discussed adding ingredients quite similar to those already found in beer, namely fruit and baked goods (and, yeah, lactose - good memory), so this week we’ll be closing things out with an overview of the things that don’t really belong in beer, like chili peppers and bacon. But hey, they often make for tasty beers, so I’m certainly not knocking them.
Spice
Spice is one of those great, fairly vague words in the English language, covering a range of ingredients from Nutmeg to Carolina Reapers, and pretty much everything under spice’s blanket umbrella has made it into a beer, somehow and somewhere.
Traditionally, which is to say, from the beginning of beer through the medieval era, adding a wide range of spices to beers was the default, particularly during the Age of Gruit. The idea was, as it always is with good food, to provide balance to the sweetness of malt by using a blend of plants and herbs to contribute bitterness to beer (or should I say ale, which was the term for unhopped beer during the period of overlap between Gruit and hops). These are still brewed, particularly (and perhaps virtually exclusively) by certain craft brewers, but hops are simply...way, way better than Yarrow and Bog Myrtle, so they’re rare.
Far less rare, however, are a number of beer-based beers which employ the use of a small number of spices, like Coriander and Bitter Orange Peel (and hey, it’s only $70 for 24 Seville Oranges! What a deal! And yes, I’ve made that insane purchase twice now, during the virtually three-week-long season, but for punch-making purposes). Among these are the classic Belgian Wit and the Gose, but you could absolutely consider Chai Spice beers, Pumpkin beers, and even something like an Oatmeal Cookie beer in this broad category.
And then, of course, you have the spicy bois. The punchline is obvious: ouch, heat. But getting there, as I discovered through trying to formulate a recipe for a staff batch of yore (with a great name - ChoChiPo Chocolate Chili Porter), can be a bit difficult, if you’re going for maximum capsaicin with minimum green chili flavor.
Option one, of course, is to treat them like the fruit they are, and add them in pureed (or sliced, etc) form, in the mash, boil, or fermenter. Reportedly, the mash yields the weakest results, but there are proponents of the boil and fermenter additions, which have their advantages - the boil method guarantees that the chilis won’t introduce bacteria to your beer, and the fermenter method should leave intact volatile compounds in the peppers which would, you know, boil off during the boil.
You can also (as a homebrewer, I should say) make a capsaicin tincture by soaking fiercely spicy bois in something like grain alcohol, and then dosing your beer to taste with that. If memory serves, this is how I ended up dosing ChoChiPo, and it worked well-ish, but a surprising amount of green chili flavor made it into the beer.
Suffice it to say, I’m no expert on the subject, but this link has a reasonably trustworthy-looking run down.
Like Arby’s, some breweries have the Meats
So far, we’ve explored sane territory, but we live in the era of Lucky Charms IPAs (I’ll never not reference it), and as such, you’d be right to assume that people have tossed animals into beer, a move with, as far as I can tell, absolutely no historical precedent.
Of the various meaty beers, one variant comes up most frequently, and that’s because it’s actually not that bad; I’m referring, of course, to Oyster Porters and Stouts.
Through a pretty insane luck of the draw, Pearl Necklace Oyster Stout was probably one of the first 25 craft beers I ever had, and I may even put it into the top five, because it’s shockingly normal. And hey, Oysters may prove to be a vitally important ecological partner as the ocean deteriorates, making this beer a planet-saver (they provide, among other things, the ability to filter vast quantities of water, while also providing shoreline erosion and storm surge protection, so...yeah, go Flying Dog for this one).
Making these is quite simple - while they used to apparently just toss the shells into the boil, since they provide calcium carbonate to the wort (which isn’t all that useful for pH adjustments, but this article claims has some clarification benefits), at some point they just started chucking the entire units in, and now we have meat in beer. Yeah.
The other road, and this is one I have yet to see attempted on a commercial scale, is to take a page out of the Bacon-infused Whiskey book and to actually include animal fat as a beer component. This is...a really terrible idea for a few reasons (least of all from a sales perspective - no vegetarians and vegans? Hard pass as an LA-based brewery), but it’s certainly been done as schtick.
Again, you’d toss the meat into the boil (or the bacon fat into kegs, potentially, since it’s the nonpolar solvent, ethanol, that’ll actually dissolve fat), but this is an insane move that’s bound to cause huge cleaning headaches. Brewing equipment just isn’t really built to handle fat, let alone the fact that fat kills head retention, so yeah, stick with oysters.
A terse re-hashing of posts past
Now, while we’ve discussed additions up to this point that are fairly macro (human-scaled), we can also, naturally, add ingredients on a micro scale, and two such examples come to mind: the various compounds in barrel woods, and microbes.
Because I’ve talked about these things in previous posts, suffice it to say that aging beer in barrels (or on wood directly, a more modern move, Budweiser aside) contributes flavors to it by the direct dissolution of wood-borne compounds into beer (which, being a solution of a strong polar and nonpolar solvent, water and ethanol respectively, is quite effective at dissolving things), as well as chemically modifying some of the compounds in beer (congeners, for one), which is why spirits are brown a lot of the time. I love how often people are shocked by the fact that all spirits exit the still more or less perfectly clear, like vodka.
Often contained in that wood, interestingly, is a family of microbes - so much so, that one guy actually started a brewery with a yeast strain isolated from a literal, actual log that he’d been brewing with, and which he’d shipped around to curious brewers who added their...microbiomes to the log. Wild. Naturally, these microbes could be fairly considered “additions” in cases where they’re not the primary fermenters (so technically, 100% Brett beers don’t fall in the “addition” category), but again, we’ve covered this hallowed ground.
Beyond this, we could of course consider oxidation as a process of adding something to beer, but, as Alton Brown says and I love to quote, that’s another post.
Conclusion
While many, like Sam (and I, to a lesser degree) may well be right to bemoan the death in effect of Brown Ales and Bitters from craft beer bottle shop shelves, the flip side is that craft beer has seen an explosion of creativity, particularly as concerns non-beer ingredients finding their way into beer.
Is this good? Since I’m on a planetary kick, I can say confidently that I’m actually not sure, because I don’t know at the moment how grains vs, say, berries rank on the energy-per-g-of-sugar scale, or even water-per-g-of-sugar scale, so it’s hard to say. I will say, though, that as farming becomes harder and riskier in a warming world (and no, sadly barley and hops don’t do well in hydroponic systems, that crossed my mind too), it’ll be quite useful indeed to be able to replace some portion of your grain (or even water, in the case of fruit juice) with sugary things sourced from restaurants or bakeries that couldn’t sell them, and hey, you never know when a hop shortage will strike so hard and deep that gruit makes sense again. An open mind may well be a necessity for the breweries of the late 21st century.
Cheers,
Adrian “End on a High Note” Febre