Rewriting the Rules of Brewing Beer

The Midas Touch, at 9 percent ABV, was my favorite, though my wife preferred the Theobroma. The Midas Touch pours a thick head and a dark golden, red-tinged color. The nose is sweet, almost like bubble gum, though it's probably the Muscat grapes and raisins Calagione throws in. It tastes hoppier than the others, though it clocks in at just 12 international bitterness units (IBU), and the hops are balanced against a brawny sweetness. Maybe it was the royal back story, but I couldn't help imagining a strong, dry ale wrapped in a golden honey robe.

The Theobroma, on the other hand, was the most beer-like of the four, and to me the least interesting. It pours a thin head with a light brown color. It's made with cocoa powder and cocoa nibs, and you taste them right up front, when the beer smooth and rich. But it's also made with ancho chilies, and soon the spice takes over, sticking around on the back of an echoing bitterness. For all that, I found it boring. But Joanna disagreed--she loved it, finding all sorts of flavors in the brew, including honey, wood, and peach. Like the Midas Touch, it's 9 percent ABV, and its flavors are likewise built along a solid alcohol backbone.

The Sah'tea carries its spice forward, with the flavor of black pepper opening the door to an array of tastes--black tea (a blend made custom for Dogfish Head in India), cloves, citrus, ginger, and spiced oranges. Yet again, this beer is 9 percent ABV, though the alcohol was less obvious this time. The head is moderately sized and the color moderately golden, but the mouthfeel is immodestly thick and foamy, as if the beer didn't open up when it left the bottle and instead waited until it reached your mouth.

Then we came to the end: Chateau Jiahu, the oldest known brewing recipe in the world. Ironically, it has the most baroque ingredients. The folks at Dogfish Head can explain it better than I can:

In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers used pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers. The rice and barley malt were added together to make the mash for starch conversion and degradation. The resulting sweet wort was then run into the kettle. The honey, grapes, Hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers were then added. The entire mixture was boiled for 45 minutes, then cooled. The resulting sweet liquid was pitched with a fresh culture of Sake yeast and allowed to ferment a month before the transfer into a chilled secondary tank.

That's a long way from the IPA my friends and I brewed (rather unsuccessfully) in their basement last month. But is it better? Alas, both Joanna and I put it last among the four. Like the others, it has a thick head and mouthfeel, with a honey brown color. There's honey in the nose, too, and honey in the taste, and honey in the...you get the idea. It verges on sickly sweet, with just hints of the many spices and herbs added to the brew, other than a slight spice and a bitter finish.

All that aside, I'd drink it again, and that counts as a victory for Calagione. After all, he's as interested in making a profit as making a point: that beer--not "extreme" beer, or "freaky-weird" beer, just beer--extends far beyond the limits placed on it by sixteenth century German princes.

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