...... in which I take some umbrage with craft brewing.

During the two years I recently spent teaching abroad in Dubai, I will admit that I missed a number of things about my homeland, the good old U.S. of A.  Prominent among them was American micro-brewed beer, or craft beer, as it has come to be called.  Don't get me wrong -- or give me too much credit, as the case may be -- I'm not particularly a beer snob.  I'm perfectly happy with a Budweiser or three, with or without buffalo wings.  But I do very much enjoy the copious variety of beer selection available at any decent American supermarket.  I'm a curious sort, and I like sampling (which is why I have come to love Wegmans' Craft-Your-Own-Six-Pack, but I digress). 

Of course, it's more than just the variety of flavors.  It's the names:  Moose Drool, Hoptimus Prime, Little Sumpin' Sumpin', Dead Guy Ale, etc.  Drinking a craft beer is an entire aesthetic experience, particularly when the name, the label art, the tastes, and the occasion all come together perfectly.  Today, for instance, I did not go into the office as I had no finals to give, and for lunch, I had one of Long Trail's winter offerings, which goes by the name of Sick Day.  I'm thankfully not sick, but that's kind of the point, right?  The beer is meant to be consumed when you're supposed to be at work.  The beer has its own ambience, and the name adds something to the experience. 

Anyway, it's this sort of thing that I like about microbrews.  There's one for virtually every occasion, with more being added to the list of options each day.  My very favorite part of craft brewing, though, is the way that it tends to follow the rhythms of the seasons.*  I suppose I probably got into this during the years I spent in Boston frequenting pubs doing my Ph.D.  I recall watching for the Sam Adams and Harpoon seasonal taps to change at our favorite watering holes, waiting anxiously for the far-too-citrusy-for-me Sam Summer Ale to relinquish it's reign -- which lasted far longer than the Boston summers, by the way -- and give way to the Octoberfest, which is still one of my favorite beers.  That's what I missed most in Dubai,** the sort of excitement that comes along with the seasonal change of the beer selection, and I recall very distinctly my first trip to Wegmans in the fall of 2013 when I got back to the States and saw, to my delight, the literally dozens of Oktoberfest and pumpkin style beers available at my fingertips.  It reminded me of when my housemate Mollie would bring home the first six-pack of Post Road Pumpkin Ale of the fall back in Boston.  The sight was glorious.

While the sight of so many fall beers for the picking may have been glorious, the experience of tasting wasn't quite as good as I'd remembered.  It seemed something had happened to craft brewing during my two year hiatus, something that was particularly noticeable in the variety of pumpkin ales.  See, the old pumpkin ales that I had remembered, like Post Road or the Smuttynose Pumpkin (I forget it's name; maybe it was just Pumpkin Ale), were for the most part just beers brewed with pumpkin, after the tradition of our Pilgrim forebears, who couldn't find any barley to brew with but would be damned if they were going to go without their beer.  Recently, however, the trend in pumpkin ales has been less in the direction of beer and more in the direction of pie.  Most pumpkin ales that I was able to find stocked in supermarket shelves this fall were loaded with a bevy of fall spices like cinnamon and cloves, brown sugar, maple syrup, whipped cream -- well, O.K. not whipped cream, but at this point it wouldn't surprised me.   

The winter/Christmas beers seem to be following the same trend.  Over the past couple of weeks, I've crafted a couple of my own six-packs at Wegmans, and I've noticed that, while the packaging and naming is perhaps slicker than ever,*** the actual beer in the bottle is getting more and more....well, curious.  To wit, Flying Dog brewers released a dual Christmas offering:  one beer a golden Belgian called Nice and the other a dark Belgian called Naughty (pictured right).  I don't know if you can read the small print, but the Naughty is brewed with orange peels and habanero peppers.  You read that right:  habanero peppers.  In one sense at least the names were appropriate.  Nice was delicious, something of a reward for good deeds done during the day.  Naughty was kind of punishing.  The thing about drinking habanero peppers is that the sting doesn't so much linger pleasantly on the front of the tongue as it does rake the back of the throat.  It was an interesting experience to drink but, in the immortal words of the great Paula Deen, uttered once after eating a too-piquant taco during a season of Food Truck Wars, I don't like my food to hurt me.  Habaneros, however, are not the only bizarre beer ingredient to appear in this season's Christmas brews.  The Evil Genius Beer Company has released a Christmas beer called "Santa!! I know him!" (props to Elf), which is brewed with rose hips, black currants, and chamomile (because the 7.2% ABV isn't relaxing enough; I need some chamomile to calm me down).  Blue Moon has a Gingerbread flavored beer.  My lovely wife has remarked after tasting many of these beers that they don't pair terribly well with food.  Well, of course not, they're designed to be desserts.  Except for the one with habaneros.  That is apparently supposed to take the place of chips and a spicy salsa, which means I need a margarita to wash it down with.     

While I applaud the creativity of the makers of these beers, particularly in packaging and naming, the trend is a little disturbing to me.  And it isn't just fall and winter, holiday type beers that are going in this direction.  All kinds of craft brews are being produced with all manner of ingredients beyond barley, hops, water, and yeast.  Leinenkugel's has a whole line of shandies available, including Cocoa Berry and Spiced Pear.  The folks at Dogfish Head -- producers of "off centered ales for off center people" -- will seemingly put anything into their beers.  Some examples of ingredients include but are not limited to lemon grass, orange and coriander (Namaste); syrah grape must (Sixty-one); and peaches (Festina Peche****).  Perhaps the most egregious example of craft brewing gone too crafty, in my humble opinion, is DuClaw's Sweet Baby Jesus chocolate peanut butter porter.  This beer is sacrilegious on two separate matrices.  Craft brewing is beginning to remind me of the projects carried on by the Grand Academy on the island of Lagado in the third of Gulliver's travels.  The Grand Academy, to remind those of you who've forgotten, is the place where scientists were attempting to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, reduce human excrement to its food particles for reuse in alimentation, and cure colic by "priming the gastrointestinal pump," i.e. inserting air into the anus.  The point Jonathan Swift was making in that satire is that it is pure folly to attempt to improve too much upon nature, and I kind of feel like that is what craft brewers are doing when, for instance, they test the utter limits of just how many hops they can possibly stuff into a West Coast IPA.  I mean, ladies and gentlemen, we're trying to improve upon beer here.  Let me say that again.  Trying to improve upon beer, the very substance of which Ben Franklin said that it is "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."  It's beer.  It's good the way it is.  Of course, slight alterations and seasonal recipes are lovely, but at the end of the day, I want my beer to taste like beer, not a spice cake, or a Reese's Peanut Butter cup, or a spicy Latin appetizer.

As I write this, I'm enjoying a Stone Coffee Milk Stout.  It claims that there's roasted coffee beans in the brew, and maybe there is, but if so, it's faint and only accents the beer-like flavors of the milk stout, a time-tested brew.  That's the direction craft-brewing ought to tack towards, making good beer.  If one wants a beverage that tastes like something other than the beverage that it claims to be, one can always get a specialty coffee at Starbucks. 


*I am indebted to whoever writes the commercials for Sam Adams beer for this phrase in this context.

**For the curious, beer is pretty readily available in Dubai.  One has to get an ID card that identifies you as non-Muslim, and there are only two chains of licensed distributors (and a 30% tax), but it is not difficult to procure beer.  For the most part, it's macro-brewed beer, whether American or European.  Yours truly drank a good deal of Amstel -- regular, not light, which is not available in the U.S. anymore and used to be a favorite of the fictional private eye Spenser in the '70s.

*** It must be admitted that I am a total sucker for clever beer packaging and naming, which leaves me rather defenseless in the face of Christmas beers especially.  I mean, look at this can.  Who could not buy it?  It looks like a candy cane and has a "To:-From:" tag and everything.  The beer inside tasted something not unlike my Grandma Eunice's fruitcake.

****Full disclosure:  Festina Peche is a terrific beer, so maybe unusual ingredients aren't always a bad thing.