Strange brew

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/03/2018 (2742 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For anyone looking to commemorate the expected legalization of recreational marijuana in Canada this summer, we have a suggestion.

You might consider parking yourself on an outdoor patio and raising a cold glass of what is poised to become Manitoba’s newest brew — a beer made with hemp.

According to a story last Saturday by Free Press business writer Martin Cash, a partnership between Fort Garry Brewing and Delta 9 Cannabis means hemp beer will hit the market nationally this summer.

The deal between the two Winnipeg companies will see Delta 9 supply Fort Garry with hemp seed for a beer that “will contain no cannabis or any other psychoactive agent produced from the cannabis plant.”

“We see this as a great partnership between two iconic brands in Manitoba,” Delta 9 CEO John Arbuthnot said in a statement. “Fort Garry Brewing is one of the best craft brewers in Canada and is particularly popular in our home province, while Delta 9 is truly Manitoba’s own cannabis producer. Combining our joint expertise will allow us to provide some really innovative beverages for customers from coast to coast.

“The fact that this is a made-in-Manitoba partnership with our favourite brewery is icing on the cake!”

We imagine this homegrown hemp beer will offer a unique taste experience, but chances are it will not be nearly as weird as the off-the-wall suds served up on today’s thirst-quenching list of Five of the Most Bizarre Brews in History:

5) The bizarre beer: “World’s Oldest Beer”

The tasting notes: According to researchers, “it was far too sour for modern-day tastes and almost tasted more like vinegar than our modern beers.” The brewer hopes to sweeten it with dates and honey “to get rid of some of the overwhelming sour flavour.”

Brewing up a story: When it comes to a well-aged brew, you probably won’t find anything much older than the beer whipped up as a joint experiment between archeologists from the University of Chicago and brewers from the Great Lakes Brewing Company.

They came up with the oldest beer anyone has replicated to date by using a 5,000-year-old recipe found in the Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi.

“To keep things as authentic as possible, they used recreations of ancient tools and ceramic fermentation pots, malted the barley on a roof, and hired a baker to create a yeast source similar to the kind used in ancient times,” according to the website MentalFloss.com. “They even refrained from using modern cleaning methods to clear natural bacteria that grow in the pots.”

By all accounts, it was a sour-tasting brew.

Closer to home, a slightly more palatable, albeit still sour, ancient brew was recreated in Winnipeg from a fourth-century beer recipe written by an Egyptian alchemist.

According to CBC, University of Winnipeg classics department chairman Matt Gibbs, aided by brewers Tyler Birch and Brian Westcott, co-owners of Barn Hammer Brewing Co. in Winnipeg, brewed a batch of the beer after painstakingly translating the recipe from ancient Greek. After baking sourdough bread with hand-milled flour, the loaves were submerged in a fermenter at Barn Hammer, turning a “sourdough milkshake” into a “very sour” pale yellow beer.

“If you expect this to taste like a modern beer, you are not going to find that,” Gibbs told CBC Winnipeg. “This beer is very, very sour. It’s good. It’s much better than I thought it was when we first did it.” The brew was likened to a flat, sour cider with hints of raisin or apple. “I’m actually blown away by how good it is,” gushed brewer Birch. “It’s actually very drinkable.”

 

4) The bizarre beer: Sapporo Space Barley

The tasting notes: Sapporo spokesman Yuki Hattori said: “Some people may expect the space beer to taste very different, but its selling point is that it’s the same.” It shouldn’t taste any different indeed, given that an analysis of the DNA from the barley grown on the International Space Station showed no difference from plants grown right here on Earth.

Brewing up a story: A Russian cosmonaut was the first human being blasted into outer space, whereas an American astronaut was the first man to walk on the moon. But for beer lovers, those achievements pale in comparison to what Japanese brewing giant Sapporo did in 2009 — creating the first space beer in history.

On Dec. 3, 2009, Sapporo launched the sale of Space Barley, the first beer produced from 100 per cent “space barley,” the progeny of barley seeds grown on the International Space Station. Gushes Sapporo’s website: “The ‘space barley’ used to make this beer is the fourth-generation descendant of the Haruna Nijo malting barley that was developed by Sapporo Breweries and kept in space for five months during 2006 as part of our collaborative research with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Okayama University with the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency in food in the space environment.”

Sapporo held an online lottery and 250 lucky beer drinkers shelled out about 10,000 yen apiece for six-packs, which converts to about $19 a bottle.

Also born in the stars was Celest-jewel-ale, another limited edition created in 2013 by Delaware’s Dogfish Head Brewery. It contained (seriously) dust from lunar meteorites, which apparently aided fermentation. Boasts the brewer: “It is made with lunar meteorites that have been crushed into dust, then steeped like tea in a rich malty Oktoberfest.” What did it taste like? It had “notes of doughy malt, toasted bread, subtle caramel and a light herbal bitterness.”

Sounds out of this world — a beer worth, um, mooning over.

 

3) The bizarre beer: Elephant Poop Beer

The tasting notes: Reviewer Mr. Sato told Japanese website RocketNews24: “When I poured it into a glass, the coffee-like aroma continued to build (and) it was relaxing like an easy Sunday morning. After taking my first sip, there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.”

Brewing up a story: In Japan, on April Fool’s Day 2013, brewer Sankt Gallen unveiled a brew that sounded like a joke, but wasn’t — the world’s first elephant poop brew.

Named “Uno, Kono Kuro,” it wasn’t brewed with elephant poop, but rather with coffee beans that had passed through the digestive system of one of the gigantic creatures. The general idea is that passing through the insides of an elephant breaks down proteins in the coffee beans, giving the strange suds a smooth, earthy flavour.

It featured the flavour of Black Ivory Coffee, a variety of your morning brew that retails for about $500 per pound because the beans are carefully harvested from elephant dung. The process is reminiscent of the exotic coffee made from partly digested beans that have been eaten and pooped out by the civet cat in southeast Asia.

In this case, the beans used for the beer come from elephants at Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, which reportedly cost more than $100 per 35 grams. Humans pick the beans out of the poop, rinse them off, and they are fermented into alcohol, which is used to enhance the flavour of a beer the Japanese brewer described as a “chocolate stout.”

This limited edition poo brew sold out within minutes of its release, despite the fact a single bottle fetched around $100. “So if you want to get your hands on some elephant poop beer, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and start from scratch,” advised MentalFloss.com.

Smells like a great idea.

 

2) The bizarre beer: Rogue Ales Beard Beer

The tasting notes: Beard Beer, an American wild ale, has been described by reviewers for BeerAdvocate as having notes of bread, citrus and banana, with a slight sourness and dry finish. Sniffed one reviewer: “The beer itself is quite normal: a sweet, bread-y American wild ale without much to distinguish it beyond a notable pineapple flavour.”

Brewing up a story: Craft brewers are famous for putting a little bit of themselves into the bottle. But you might say that John Maier, the master brewer at Oregon’s Rogue Ales, got a little carried away with the concept. On April Fool’s Day 2013 — and no, it wasn’t a joke — the brewer released its infamous Beard Beer, brewed with a yeast created from Maier’s 34-year-old beard.

“The company was searching for a yeast to complement the local ingredients in a new beer when some joker suggested Maier’s beard might be the perfect place to look. He agreed to try it, and plucked nine hairs from his beard, which were sent to White Labs for testing and culturing… It turns out Maier’s beard hairs can produce yeast — and pretty decent yeast at that,” MentalFloss.com wrote when the brew was introduced.

As National Geographic noted, the new yeast was isolated from the bacteria lying in the beard. “After further analysis, the brewers found that the new yeast was a hybrid of the brewery’s house-made yeast known as ‘Pacman’ and the bacteria found in the brewmaster’s beard,” the magazine’s website notes. “So unknown to Maier, he was a walking Petri dish for the Pacman yeast used at Rogue,” MentalFloss chimes in. “And he might have picked up the wild yeast from eating something fruity, creating this unique blend for beer.”

It has been hailed as the No. 1 strangest craft beer ingredient in the world. And we doubt it was a close shave.

 

1) The bizarre beer: “The End of History” Ale

The tasting notes: As a reviewer on RateBeer.com put it: “Dark brown, orange hue, no head. Leaves legs on the glass. Aroma is apple, toffee, boozy. Body is smooth with soft carbonation. Taste is crazy rich, totally fills the mouth with flavour, big toffee, huge alcohol vibes, oily, brandy. One of the most intense-tasting beverages I’ve ever had, for sure. Enjoyable in its own way, but I wouldn’t want to drink a full squirrel’s worth.”

Brewing up a story: Sometimes it’s not so much what you put in your beer as it is what you put your beer into. Consider famously quirky Scottish beer-maker BrewDog’s 2010 offering of “The End of History,” a 50 per cent ABV beer that sold for a whopping $765 a bottle.

What did you get for all that cash? Well, it was a lot more than just a limited-edition super-strong Belgian blond ale. It was, in fact, a limited-edition, freeze-distilled Belgian blond ale of which only 12 bottles were made, each of which was contained within the taxidermied body of a deceased grey squirrel or weasel.

We sort of wish we were kidding, but we’re not. It was infused with nettles from the Highlands and fresh juniper berries and meant for drinking in small amounts.

“The striking packaging was created by a very talented taxidermist and all the animals used were road kill,” BrewDog, known for pushing the boundaries of good taste, gushes on its website. “The release is a limited run of 11 bottles, seven stoats and four grey squirrels.” A 12th bottle was sent to the internet video blog BeerTapTV.

Not surprisingly, some animal organizations called the taxidermy gimmick “perverse.” Says BrewDog: “The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage between art, taxidermy and craft brewing. The bottles are at once beautiful and disturbing — they disrupt conventions and break taboos, just like the beer they hold within them.”

In 2016, the brewer decided to offer a bottle of the rodent-packaged brew to investors who had committed at least $20,000 toward their new facility near Columbus, Ohio. Some of the rodents sported tiny kilts or tuxedos. Concludes a statement on the brewer’s website: “It is without doubt one of the most talked-about things we have ever done, probably due to the road-kill taxidermy as much as the strength of the beer.”

Beer served in road kill? We’ll drink to that, but for now we’ll stick to a glass of milk, provided it’s not served in the remains of an entire cow. Down the hatch!

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca