Craft brewers love to experiment. Whether they’re home brewers or work at a major craft brewery, creativity is really at the heart of this industry. Brewers are always willing to push the envelope with styles of beer as well as ingredients. Purists will tell you that adding things like vanilla, chocolate or chili peppers to beer is unnecessary and in some cases, offensive, but others embrace the experimental nature of brewing and have fun with figuring out different ways to create their favorite beverage. Let’s take a look at five weird beers and their strange ingredients…
1. Bottled Instinct, 6/1% ABV (The Order of Yoni)
While trying to come up with something witty and funny to write about this vagalicious beer I realized that nothing was better to describe this beer than the words on their website. All typos are their own…
“Imagine woman of your dreams, your object of desire. Her charm, her sensuality, her passion… Try how she tastes, feel her smell, hear her voice… Now imagine her giving you a passionate massage and gently whispering anything you’d like to hear. Now free your fantasies and imagine all of that can be closed in a bottle of beer. A golden drink brewed with her lure and grace and flavored with wild instincts. Imagine a beer which every sip offers a rendez-vous with this hot woman of your dreams… she hugs you and kisses you gently, looking straight into your eyes… How much would you give for such a beer?
The secret of the beer lies in her vagina. Using hi-tech of microbiology, we isolate, examine and prepare lactic acid bacteria from vagina of a unique woman. The bacteria, lactobacillus, transfer woman’s features, allure, grace, glamour, and her instincts into beers and other products, turning them into dance with lovely goddess.”
Though they have very high standards for their models that they use in the Bottled Instinct campaign. “Every model in the beer project has to sign the contract with high penalty for working in adult industry, sex industry, as adult actress, escort, prostitute, etc., etc., etc.” Because vagina beer can’t get a bad rep…
2. Pisner Pilsner, Unknown ABV (Nørrebro Bryghus)
A Danish brewery is taking upcycling to a whole new level by using human urine to help create a specialty beer lovingly dubbed, Pisner. In an effort to highlight what they are calling beer-cycling, this brewery used urine from a huge music festival in Denmark called Roskilde Music Festival. They gathered over 50,000 liters of urine and used it to fertilize the barley crops used to make this pilsner. The drug content of the festival urine alone should give one pause, but apparently, it makes for great fertilizer. This beer was made specifically to sell at this year’s 2017 festival as a way to utilize the immense amount of waste created by a fest of this size.
3. Beard Beer, 4.8% ABV (Rogue Ales)
Truthfully, one could write a whole blog on the topic of strange beer ingredients and never look any further than Rogue Ales. They have a true zest for experimentation and their Voodoo series uses ingredients like donuts, bacon, maple, pretzels, banana, and lemons. True to this spirit, this American Wild Ale is made with the hair of a beard. Not just any beard either, the beard of John Maier, Rogue Ale’s master brewer. Apparently, they were looking for a new source of yeast and someone joked that Maier’s beard would be a good yeast producer since it had been around for more than 15,000 brews and sure enough, a yeast was born from his facial hair and used to brew Beard Beer. This brew is actually reported to be really good and won a gold medal at the 2015 World Beer Championships in the category of wild American ale.
4. Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout, 7.5% ABV (Wynkoop Brewing Company)
Sometimes the strange ingredient in a beer really does leave you scratching your, ahem, head. This beer, brewed in Denver at Wynkoop Brewing Company originally as an April fools joke, is described as a meaty, foreign-style stout made with Colorado base malts, roasted barley and 25 lbs of roasted bull testicles. People seem to like this beer though, regularly giving it a 7/10 or higher on Ratebeer.com. This beer was so popular at the outset that it enjoys a limited release yearly and happens to be on tap right now in their tasting room.
Although we do like to make additions to some of our beers here at Thorn Street Brewery, you are more likely to see jalapenos in our Chilecabra Pale Ale, coconut in our Castaway Coconut Porter and one-off additions like cashews in our Smuggler’s Cove Agave amber, than beard yeast or bull testicles. We salute these beers, though, because without this constant push for creativity and experimentation, craft beer wouldn’t be as awesome as it is today.