Turning Up the Heat

We’ve all seen lime wedges in our bottles of Mexican beer, orange slices carefully placed on the lip of a hefeweizen, and even other fruits to adorn our beers for the upcoming warmer weather.      

There are so many fruit flavored beers beyond mentioning, but blueberry and apple seem to be pretty common compared to the more exotic fruity combinations that brewers all over the country create in their laboratories (i.e. the brewery).

If you love warm weather, why not sweat a little more with a chipotle porter or a jalapeño lager?  Sriracha stout anyone?

If the combination of hot pepper flavor in your beer sounds delicious or disgusting, the truth of the matter is that these beers are worth giving it a try. If you ever ate the worm from the bottom of a mezcal bottle, then sampling some hot pepper in your beer will be a piece of cake. Peppers aside, you have to ask yourself some questions about your beer preferences in general. If you don’t like stouts, then you might not like Rogue’s Sriracha Stout. Or maybe you will, who knows. That’s the beauty of craft beer – in our minds we may hear a combination of ingredients and expect one thing, and get a completely different result on our taste buds. I haven’t tried it yet, but there’s a red bottle with a green cap in my fridge waiting for me, and it’s not hot sauce!

Hot peppers aren’t for everyone though, whether they are in beer or on food, and in these cases I would advise you to stay away because some of these beers pack a punch, while others have a subtle hint of heat that creeps up on you at the end. These beers are not for the faint of heart. Rather, they’re for the beer explorers, those who want to push their flavor boundaries as far as they can go. Hot pepper beer is certainly exotic and adventurous, but for flavor cravers, they just can’t get enough and will look for the next imaginative concoction. When it comes to beer, I will try anything and everything, and if I dislike it, I’ll finish it politely and remember its name. With food I’m much less adventurous so I’m happy that I’ve found something I can discover without being afraid. The only time I will intentionally ADD hot sauce or chipotle salt to my beer is in a michelada, a Mexican beer cocktail that has more ingredients in it than beer itself but is a delicious mouth watering wonder. Hand crafted beers infused with hot peppers however, are in another category altogether.

If you think that beer and heat is a bad idea, just remember all the bad ideas/happy mistakes that happened – like the potato chip, the Buffalo chicken wing, peanut butter and celery, etc. – and that have endured throughout the test of time. So before you start wagging your finger at a red beer bottle with a green cap and call it a marketing ploy (well maybe it is, just a little), just remember that there is handcrafted beer underneath that cap and inside that cute bottle, and it may only be around for a limited time. So this season, as we await summer, let’s all be beer flavor cravers and turn up the heat regardless of the weather! Cheers!

Gloria Rakowsky