This month’s topic for The Session is novelty beers. Several of the breweries I like make some weird stuff all the time, but I don’t think I count a regular saison made with cucumbers or with a ton of herbs added to the barrel a novelty beer. Those are a little offbeat, but well within the normal range of beers, especially for saison.
No, I think of novelty beers as beers you’d pretty much only drink as a gag. I remember going to a garlic-themed restaurant called the Stinking Rose — they had garlic ice cream on the menu, with a note saying they had it for completeness couldn’t really recommend it.
And that’s about what I think of novelty beers. I’ve seen Cave Creek Chili Beer in the grocery store, but I was never tempted to drink it, even though I have a friend who grew up in the small Arizona town where it’s made. When we went to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, we picked up a bottle of chocolate beer that was just passable. And I was pleasantly surprised by Bandwagon’s Raspberry Jalapeno Ale, which was very good for a novelty beer.
But I think the most novel novelty beer I’ve ever had, and probably the most interesting to drink, was Indra Kunindra from Ballast Point. This is a collaboration with a homebrewer, that used Madras curry and a bunch of other spices. The base beer was a stout, so there was a lot of body and sweetness, but the spiciness came through strongly, making for a very intense slow-sipping drink. And it even had a little bit of lingering heat to it.
I don’t think I’m going to use curry in any of my brews any time soon, and I certainly don’t expect a big national trend of curry beers to get started. But it was very different and thought-provoking. And that is the promise I see in novelty beers. Sure, they are often not very good. They are sometimes just cheap crap to give dad something to buy at the gift shop. But every now and again, they expose you to a new element you could see using in other beers, and make you think about a possibility you’d never have given a chance otherwise.