essential food & beverage
ALL UP IN YOUR ALE
JALAPEÑO BEERS BY KYLE JACOBSON Sick and tired of bland cheese dips? Is your nacho party full of no-shows? Do you want to hurt yourself just a little bit on the inside? Then you need jalapeños. That’s right, say goodbye to uneventful bowel movements, and say hello to a new way to compare yourself to people you barely know. Wanna spice up that burger? Add jalapeños. Kick up that cornbread? Peño. Turn a beer into a sinus cleanser? Eh, maybe that’s taking it too far. At least, that’s what good sense would tell you. But consider brewing in historical terms, during times when a beer could only be crafted from, for the most part, local ingredients. Odds are jalapeño beers were being done centuries ago where brewing was commonplace and jalapeños were plentiful. JustBeer suggests South America, particularly in places where people brewed chicha de jora (corn beer). Were the jalapeño iterations any good? I mean, probably...sometimes. More importantly, are jalapeño beers good today. Well...sometimes. Though there’s a lot of subjectivity involved in what constitutes a desirable beer, most beer drinkers can agree on when a brew is undrinkable. Kind of like Da’Bomb, a hot sauce that catches 44 | m a d i s o n e s s e n t i a l s
everyone off guard in the YouTube web series Hot Ones. In the show, Sean Evans interviews celebrity guests while eating hot wings of varying heat, and nobody enjoys Da’Bomb. It only seeks to be hot—taste be damned, at least, that’s the impression the show leaves. When I first noticed jalapeño beers hitting the mainstream a few years back, I bought a few six packs with no expectations. Most iterations came off as an answer to “can we?” rather than “should we?” The answer to both questions is a yes, but ignoring the second question often results in some unimpressive IPAs centered around heat with barely a nod to the fact that there’s a beer in that bottle. That’s really the risk taken with rushing to be among the first to put out
something—you might come off as a gimmick. Sarah Ferree, assistant brewer at Ooga Brewing Company in Beaver Dam, says “I think there’s something to be said this day and age for just something simple and clean and crisp when everybody is doing something crazy.” With so many more blurred lines on the liquor-store shelf, are we crossing into a craft-brewing reality where brewing novelty beers is no longer a novelty? I don’t think so. There are still some Cream Ales and Amber Ales buried in the avalanche of IPAs, but those novelty beers sure do make a lot of racket. To put Sarah’s point into context, using an ingredient that might be considered crazy doesn’t have to equate to a crazy beer. In fact, Ooga’s jalapeño Cream Ale, Holla!, finds a way to highlight the
