Long gone are the times when people would question your sanity if you drink a pale ale infused with #Grapefruit. Nowadays it is pretty common to use all kind of adjuncts in craft beer #brewing. A #chocolate or #coffee #stout is just as normal as a #fruited #sour. Actually, using fruit in beer was done way before brewing lager in large scales got popular. But in the following beers they added more than just a bunch of cherries or a chocolate bar.
There are many aspects that can make you think a beer is weird, and one of the strangest weird additions is a #yeast collected from a special place. Yeasts are single-celled members of the fungus kingdom. And most importantly, they are what makes the beer. #Brewers only make wort but the yeasts do the rest.
And they are everywhere around you, maybe also on the chair your sitting on. So 40FT brewery from #London went to find a special chair to find a yeast strain on. What they found was the custom-made chair of Roald Dahl. For those of you, who don't know him, he is the author of some of the most popular children's stories of the 20th century: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,,Matilda,,James and the Giant Peach and more. That's what we call an odd place to collect yeasts from.
Photo courtesy of 40FT Brewery
Another great example of a rather strange way to collect your yeast, is what the guys from Fossil Fuels are doing. The Story of this beer begins 45 million years ago, when a #prehistoric bee became encased in tree sap. Over the years the tree sap hardened and became amber, which preserved its content. In 1995 it was excavated by a microbiologist named Dr. Raul Cano. He was able to revive about 2'000 #microorganisms which had lain dormant in the gut of the bee.
A few of those 2'000 organisms were yeast strains. They resembled the modern #Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in other words, the yeast that is used daily by numerous brewers to brew beer. So what came next was the only logical step after a discovery of this magnitude. Raul and partner in science Chip Lambert teamed up with some brewmasters and brewed some beer. Dinosaur beer, yummy!
Enough of weird yeast strains, let's talk about what breweries add after fermentation ended. #TwistedPine brewery thought they needed to add some spice to their customers' lives. The base of this beer is a very relaxed wheat ale with 5.2% ABV. But then they decided, they wanted to make the spiciest beer in the world.
Instead of dry-hopping this beer, they dry-peppered it with 6 different types of #chillis: Anaheim, Fresno, jalapeño, Serrano, habanero, and the infamous Bhut Jolokia or Ghost Pepper. The result was a beer that they call: The hottest beer this side of Hell! Spice up your life, drink some chilli beer!
Photo courtesy of Twisted Pine Brewing Co
A list like this one can never be complete without 2 breweries that are both known for making mostly really awesome beer, but also experimenting a lot. And #EvilTwin and #Lervig show us another uncommon post fermentation addition.
This beer was brewed with frozen #pizza. If that isn't weird enough for you, maybe the second ingredient will be: actual #money. I think there is one question in your head now: why? The simple answer is: because they can. But there is actually an idea behind this. Norway has the highest consummation of frozen pizza per capita in the whole world and they are the richest country in the world, so what else would you add to a Norwegian beer?
So you think after those 4 brews it can't get any weirder? Let me introduce you to #Wynkoop Brewing from Denver, Colorado. For a lot of people the idea of adding actual Oysters to a #Stout is already strange enough. But at Wynkoop they thought of something different: Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Maybe if, like us, you are not from Denver or the US in general, the term Rocky Mountain Oysters won't tell you a lot. Maybe you are thinking were do they farm #Oysters in the Rockies. We will tell you where: on bulls. The term refers to fried bull testicles, a specialty dish from Colorado. And that is exactly what the beer is brewed with, whole testicles from free range bulls from #Colorado are added to the beer. The result is a creamy Stout, which is as local as it gets. Cheers!
Photo courtesy of Wynkoop Brewing
This is our (incomplete) list of really strange brews from all over the world. Tell us about the weirdest beer you have ever tasted or brewed in the comments below and maybe we will do another post about it with you recommendations.
Cheers,
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