Beer and “With-it”

When I was growing up in southern Indiana with my three siblings, our mother was both an excellent and very creative cook. I won’t say that we were “experimented” on, but she was a master at constructing new and different meals from a very wide variety of ingredients in interesting ways and sometimes you just never knew what might appear on the table. We had all learned at an early age that if you were too picky, you went hungry, so eating what was served was the general standard of practice for all of us. Rather than give any of us an opportunity to build any preconceived ideas about what might be appearing on the the table for the next meal, when asked what dinner would be, her answer was typically “bread and with-it”… which when translated from “mom-speak” to English meant “we will be having bread and something tasty to go along with it”. We definitely never went hungry and as a result of these experiences and the tremendous variety of food that we were exposed to, the love of food variety has carried over into my adult life. There are very few foods that that I do not enjoy, I will try most any new food and I have eaten many foods that most would consider exotic and/or unusual.

Over the years I have found that some similar principles can apply to a brewer’s creativity in beer making… brewing beer and then adding some other ingredient(s) to the beer to go “with-it”; just to make it tasty and interesting. Let me start this off by giving you an example. Earlier this week I was making an all too infrequent visit to one of favorite local beer haunts, the Three Penny Taproom here in Montpelier, and had the chance to revisit a beer that I had tasted before, but never from the tap… Dieu du Ciel Route des Épices. This beer is slightly unusual because it is flavored with both green and black peppercorns. The pepper flavor and spiciness is particularly strong in the finish and I really enjoy this beer. Scott Kerner, one of TPT’s owners, and I had a brief, but very enthusiastic conversation about how good this beer would pair up with a juicy roast beef, pastrami or (even better!) a Montreal smoke meat sandwich. The addition of the peppercorns, while not your average beer additive, created a unique and tasty combination; in other words, the “with-it” really makes the beer for me in this case.

Don’t get me wrong, I also like beer which has been brewed traditionally, even those that would conform to the old and very strict German Beer Law of “reinheitsgebot”. I just find it occasionally interesting to have a beer with a little something extra or different to add some variety for me. As I am sure many of you would agree, life is just way too short to drink boring beer!

There are many other common examples of non-standard beer additives which bring new and interesting flavors to beer. Everyone is familiar with the fall seasonal pumpkin beers that appear every year. I wrote an article (Pumpkin Ales – A Sign of the Season) last fall about some of these beers that I had been drinking. The three beers of this type are but a few of the dozens of this type available mostly in the fall, but some are available all year.

There is a great variety of other common “with-it” beer ingredients. Many of these beers used to be made seasonally, but in today’s global economy, a brewer does at least have the choice to use imported, rather than local “with-its”, to produce the beer off-season if they wanted to. Some examples include:

There are some truly unusual beers that combine one or more exotic (bizarre?) ingredients to produce sometimes spectacular “with-it” results. Again, not an exhaustive listing, but some examples within my experience base:

  • Dogfish Head Chateau Jiahu is one of the more unusual beers that I have had lately. It represents the brewer’s interpretation of a 9,000 year old beer “recipe” and includes rice, honey, grapes and hawthorn fruit as it’s “with-its”. This all combined to produce a beer that was a bit too sweet for my preferences, but extremely unusual none the less.
  • Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale is brewed using the same red rice that the Kiuchi Brewery uses to make the saki that they also sell. The beer is light red in color with a pink head and has the fruity sourness that you would expect to find in a fine saki. Beer with a most unusual “with-it” indeed.
  • Rock Art Jasmine Pale Ale is a pale ale brewed with jasmine and other herbs. I can’t say that it was my favorite, just a bit too flowery for me, but it is the only beer that I have had with jasmine as it’s “with-it”.
  • Magic Hat Wacko is made with some beet sugar and real beet extract. It was a pale red in color with a pink head. You could not specifically identify the beets in the flavor profile, but there was something “with-it” that made it very different than most beers I have had.

Beer is an amazingly diverse, globally produced product. Each geographical region and ethnic culture that produces beer, does so in a slightly different way. Sometimes those differences are a result of different local ingredients, production techniques and in some cases what is included along “with-it”. For me, just like the eating habits that I developed early in my life, some of the pleasure I derive from drinking beer is in trying new and different ones… I crave the variety that the beer market can bring me. Sometimes the extras that come along “with-it” can really make a huge difference to me. Find your own favorite “with-it”; seek out some beer that breaks the mold of what is considered “traditional” and I think that you’ll agree that that short journey outside of normalcy was well worth the trip!

One Comment to “Beer and “With-it””

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