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| BEER….YECCHH!!! I’ve previously written about Rheinheitsgebot, the German purity law which defines water, barley, hops and yeast as the only ingredients allowed in the brewing of beer, and how it is often disregarded by modern brewers. We’ve read about all sorts of fruits, vegetables, spices, coffees and other flavorings which make new styles of beer, or simply change the make-up of a long established style such as “mango” IPA or “raspberry vanilla “ stout. But at least, eclectic ingredients are everyday, readily available commodities which can be enjoyed by them themselves, without being added to beer. More recently however, brewers have been adding strange ingredients to resurrect ancient styles, and create new ones which defy the imagination of normal beer drinkers and serve mainly to “push the envelope” and demonstrate that some brewers have gone “over the top”. It didn’t take long for Icelandic brewers to go over the top. Prohibition in Iceland only ended in 1989. One would think that at the end of that horrible dry spell, Icelandic drinkers would be well satisfied with a nice helles, doppelbock or even an imperial stout. But apparently the brewers at the Stedji Brewery in Borgarfjordor thought that Icelanders need something more, so they began brewing Hvajur beer for the annual Thorri Festival in January and February, where festival goers dine on fermented sharks, sour whale fat and ram’s balls. With a cuisine like that, it’s only fitting that a brew like Hvajur accompany the feast because it is brewed with whale testicles smoked over fires of sheep dung! Can you just imagine John Wayne walking into Cohan’s Pub in ‘The Quiet Man” and saying “Barkeep! I’ll have one of those sheep shit beers”? The Order of Yoni Brewery in Warsaw uses “hi tech microbiological techniques to prepare the lactic acid bacteria from the vagina of a unique woman” for use as yeast to start the fermentation process. Their ad proclaims “Made from the essence of a hot underwear model”. Drinking this vagina beer will most likely NOT replace certain aspects of a sexual encounter. Closer to home, but also referencing a novel way of harvesting wild yeast, is the Rogue Brewery of Oregon, brewers of Rogue Beard Beer which uses a wild yeast cultured from nine hairs off the chin of brewmaster John Maier. I sampled this beer only once, but it was after attending an Oktoberfest in Helen, Georgia. Many pints of Augustiner, Hacker-Pschorr, Paulaner and other German festbiers kind of dulled the palate but the name alone was enough to make me retch. Even closer to home, Sam Calgione, founder of Dog Fish Head brewery in Delaware and renowned for his knowledge and expertise on all things “beer”, recently brewed “Chicha” from an ancient Peruvian recipe which calls for chewing a purple colored corn and using the saliva generated as a fermenting agent. Perhaps the judges at a brew competition could define the mouthfeel of this beer as “chewy”. Not only one but TWO breweries have noted the importance of cat shit in the brewing process. The Mikkeller Brewery of Copenhagen was the first brewery to brew Beer Geek Brunch Weasel which uses coffee beans excreted by the weasel-like civet cat, who dines only on the richest and ripest of the coffee beans. Special enzymes in the digestive tract of the civet break down the beans to make them suitable for inclusion in the beer. Not to be outdone, the Perrin Brewery of Michigan brews Big Konas using the same technique. I wonder who first saw a civet cat relieving itself and thought “Hey! This might be useful in my next batch of beer”. Keeping with the idea of #2 making beer, we must not forget Sankt Gallens Brewery of Japan which takes the civet digestion process to a new high. They brew “Un Kono Kuro” (a takeoff on the word “Unko” , or Japanese for “crap”), a Black Ivory Coffee Beer brewed with coffee beans hand picked out of elephant shit. The excrement is provided by Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, which evidently charges great deal for their elephants’ offerings since a keg of this beer sells for $1100, or $1100 more than I’d be willing to pay. “Pisner” beer from Denmark is brewed with barley fertilized by 50,000 liters of human urine collected from the troughs at the Danish Roskilde Music Festival. The Danish Agricultural and Food Council calls this “beercycling”. I call it NUTS! Not all ingredients have to be run through a digestive system, however. Some are just added BEFORE ingestion such as those in Dock Street Brewery’s Walker Beer, which uses pre-sparge goat brains in the brew. The claim is that this beer will make you smarter, but frankly I believe this to be an outright lie. The dumbest human who ever lived HAS to be smarter than a goat! The Suntory Brewery of Japan adds two grams of collagen per can to it’s “Precious” beer, which is aimed at the female market, in an attempt to make them think they’ll look younger by drinking it. The Three Sheeps Brewery of Sheboygan, Wisconsin brewed a onetime only beer “Nimble Lips, Noble Tongue”, an IPA made with Italian squid ink. If somehow an Albanian squid got mixed up in the extraction process, would this ruin the batch? Colorado’s Wynkoop Brewery is widely known for it’s Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout, which includes 25 lbs of freshly sliced and roasted bull testicles in each batch. Perhaps a way to increase one’s testosterone? Home brewer Dailey Crafton of Brooklyn uses ants to make his beer. He decided to include flower petals in his latest brew and was just about to throw them in when he noticed a column of ants marching out. He though “What the hell….maybe I’ll get a really wild yeast strain from them”. So in went the ants. Also from the insect world comes “Bumblebeer’, made by brewing researchers at North Carolina University, who theorize that pollinating insects would be a great source of wild yeast due to their close association with flowering plants. (Your children’s tuition pays for this kind of thing). As for me, I think I’ll stick with more traditional methods of making beer. After reading about some of the above nonsense, even a Caramel Porter sounds pretty good. Cheers! Dan |
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Beer My Way.........
Beernexus.com proudly presents....DAN HODGE, beer reviewer, historian and raconteur
by Dan Hodge
