Any Food Can Be Turned Into Beer
The beauty of the craft beer world is the unbridled enthusiasm to brew something that's never been tasted before. However, creating a beer with a familiar taste can be an almost greater challenge.
Take Shmaltz Brewing's new Pastrami Pilsner. Created in partnership with Barcade, an East Coast chain of game-filled craft beer bars, the Pastrami Pils grew out of the simple desire to collaborate on something adventurous. Why did they pick pastrami? That detail has been lost to empty pint glasses. But when the haze of late-night discussions cleared, brewer Richie Saunders was still up for the challenge.
"The biggest hurdle was getting each flavor into liquid form," he says. "We didn't want to just boil pastrami, because the oil and grease isn't ideal for brewing." Instead, he and his brew team picked apart a pastrami sandwich by taste, isolating ingredients to use. "The key points we hit were salt, pepper, ground caraway, horseradish, bread, an acid for the horseradish, smoked malt for meaty character, and caramel notes for bread," he explains.
The resulting beer is big on horseradish and caraway, and as you lift it to your mouth, you get the same aroma as if you were about to bite into a piled-high pastrami sandwich.
As bizarre as it sounds, the crisp pastrami lager from Shmaltz is hardly the weirdest food-inspired beer around. The craft veterans at Oregon's Rogue Ales have been playing with culinary brews for decades and today offer a chocolate ale, an annual series of doughnut beers, and a Sriracha stout.
In some cases, turning a food into liquid form is as simple as adding that ingredient to the brew kettle or fermentors, says Brett Joyce, president of Rogue. The Sriracha for their stout goes straight into fermentors, blending with the beer as yeast turns sugar into alcohol. For the Chocolate Stout, the brewery adds a liquid chocolate from Belgium while the beer is aging.
The doughnut series is another story. The beers are inspired by the creations of Portland, Oregon's famous Voodoo Doughnut shop, but Joyce says they didn't want to simply toss boxes of the baked good into their kettles. "The right flavors won't come out in the finished beer."
Instead, Rogue follows the same process as Shmaltz, breaking down the flavor components. For Rogue's Voodoo Doughnut Mango Astronaut Ale (inspired by Voodoo's Mango Tango doughnut filled with mango jelly and topped with vanilla frosting and Tang), Joyce says he had to pick out the best ingredients to recreate sweet mango, vanilla, and NASA's famous orange drink.
Rogue's food-beer expertise didn't come without a few harsh lessons, says Joyce. "One batch that lives on only in Rogue lore is the garlic ale we brewed for a garlic festival. It was as bad an idea as it sounds."
Is there any food Springsteen couldn't turn into a beer? "No," he says, "absolutely not."
This garlic-filled failure points to the real challenge of food beers-mastering the savory. Sweet flavor comes natural to beer since barley releases natural sugars in the brewing process. The difficulty of getting spicy, earthy, salty, and meaty flavor into something drinkable is why there's a considerable lack of porkchop soda or cheeseburger root beer.
One operation that's enjoyed impressive success with savory (and sweet) food beers is Michigan's Right Brain Brewery. The spring seasonal Spear Beer, for example, is designed to imitate grilled asparagus. After trying several methods of asparagus preparation, says owner Russell Springsteen, the brew team settled on grilling the vegetable over gas. "I wanted a little singe to it, so it tasted like summer," he says. "Cooking it over charcoal was too smokey."
Is there any food Springsteen couldn't turn into a beer? "No," he says, "absolutely not." Case in point is Right Brain's most infamous beer, the Mangalitsa Pig Porter, described by the brewery as a "porter brewed with real pig parts" including a USDA-certified smoked pig head. As odd as it sounds, the beer comes together so beautifully that it won a gold medal for experimental beers at the 2011 Great American Beer Festival, which is basically the Super Bowl for beer.
What's for dessert? Right Brain also makes four pie beers-cherry, apple, blueberry, and pecan-with actual pies. Depending on batch size, up to 80 pies go into the fermentor. Yes, says Springsteen, the fat from the pie takes an extra step to remove from the beer. But Right Brain's team simply cools the beer so that the oils sit on the top of the tank like skin on cooling soup while the liquid is drained out below.
Asparagus and smoked pig heads aside, Springsteen offers his guiding principle for food brews to anyone itching to concoct a beer honoring their favorite sandwich or snack: "We try not to make the flavor overpowering. It should always taste like beer."
As for that Pastrami beer, how did a smoked meat brew turn out? In a PM office tasting of Shmaltz's meaty brew, the reactions were spilt-mostly depending on whether or not you like horseradish.
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