There are two tasty and timeless consumables with flavors people keep experimenting with: beer and potato chips. Each year, Lay’s unveils new flavors like Bacon Mac and Cheese or Creamy Garlic Caesar Salad chips (why no one has invented pesto or chicken parmesan potato chips is still beyond me). And now breweries are picking up the trend with beers like Rogue’s Sriracha Stout or Shmaltz Brewing’s Pastrami Pils. And while many might say, “Yuck, leave beer to its traditional flavors, please!,” we say, “Keep It Up!”
Food is meant to be experimented with. All those parents who told us not to play with our food (or our beer) had it all wrong! You don’t get cheddar and sour cream ruffled chips without breaking a few rules. And you don’t get lavender black current cider or a jalapeno Kolsch without trying a few bad recipes in between. But thankfully there are some breweries trying new things — have you read this? — and, with that in mind, we want to offer you some thoughts for new beer ideas based on tastes we love, a few tastes that miiiiiight take brews too far and a couple weird beers out now that we adore. Cheers!
Beer flavors I’d like to see in 2017:
Brownie a la Mode:
Dessert and drinking always go together. Imagine a thick, chocolaty beer with some vanilla bean notes. I’m drunk just fantasizing about it.
Turkey Leg:
Just light enough to make this work. Feels like a turkey leg beer would taste a lot like a Bass lager, somehow. There’d be dark, savory notes but there would also be an easy, lighter tone to the brew. I’d try it!
3-Cheese:
Not heavy like a steak or other dark meat, but stinky and yeasty enough to work in suds form. I’d pick parmesan, Asiago and Swiss cheese as my blends for this brew.
Pho:
Pho is super flavorful but it’s also easy to drink. There are so many bright spices in pho, especially when not using beef broth, can be effervescent and lovely. The perfect two descriptors for beer.
Maybe a couple of beer flavors that would go too far:
Pot Roast:
Too thick, too heavy, too bloody. Any thick meat – even if you get the flavors down the their essence (not, say, boiling pot roast in the brew mash but getting black pepper and other individual flavors in), it would still be too much and feel more like swallowing a pot roast milkshake than anything else.
Spaghetti and Meatballs:
Too salty and too meaty. Some foods are meant to stay foods – even though we love spaghetti and meatballs practically more than life itself.
Food that should be flavored like beer:
Doughnuts:
Wake yourself up with a sugary breakfast that tastes like a floral session IPA or a malty Scotch Ale. Trick your mind into thinking it’s happy hour when really it’s just 8am on a Tuesday.
Rice:
Imagine heaping some Thai ginger chicken onto pilsner-flavored rice. That would be delicious! Light, flavorful, it would hit you on your palate and pleasantly in the nose. What a gift!
Two flavored beer oddities that exist right now:
Right Brain Brewery’s Mangalitsa Pig Porter:
This beer is brewed with actual smoked Mangalitsa pig bones and heads! Yuck. Just…yuck. Also Rogue makes a bacon and maple syrup beer that also sounds bad. Don’t put pork in beer. Pork is too hard on the stomach to digest in a quickly-quffed brew!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDnrhPvo5JY/
Wells Young Brewing’s Banana Bread:
Okay, this actually sounds decent. It could be nasty — too sweet, too banana-y — but it could also maybe be good. Many people describe hefeweizens as tasting like banana (like Hacker Pschorr’s), so maybe this one actually has a chance?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BOBF7JJhn2K/
Consume is an essential source for food and beverage news, trends, tips, original recipes and everything in between. Want to read more? Try these posts: Cheese Lattes Are Now A Thing, 9 Of The Best Pumpkin Beers In America, and What I Ate Today: Coquine’s Katy Millard.
