Kyle Nabilcy
I love a good beer theme. My Google calendar and Notes app — to say nothing of various corners of my basement — are filled with ideas and collections for themed tastings, verticals, horizontals, laterals, you name the direction, I have an idea for it.
So here I was with a perfectly good theme for this week’s column. We in Madison had just seen two brand-new, sparkly-fresh mango milkshake IPAs joining a recently-released third already on the shelf. I picked up a single of each, and was all ready to fire off a side-by-side-by-side comparison. Fairly straightforward, sure, but it was a theme.
And then I spotted the french fry beer. I’m sorry, the vanilla shake/burger/french fry beer. My theme was blown to hell by the Swedes with one 16-oz. can.
This beer, Super Size Hilma Double Dry Hopped Double Vanilla Burger Bun Crispy Fries Imperial India Pale Ale from Stockholm-based gypsy brewer Omnipollo, to be exact, was a bit of a reckoning for me. A “come to Jesus” beer, if you will. It’s the adjuncts. My love for wacky non-beer ingredients is well-known and acknowledged in this column. But I’d like to think I want my adjunct ingredients to have some internal logic to them. Dark roasted malts to chocolatey flavors to actual chocolate to hey, what goes good with chocolate?
The milkshake IPA, which sees body and haze delivered at least partially by way of lactose milk sugar, is already sort of a thing without a good reason for being. The thought process is already strained from citrusy IPA to let’s add milk!, without tacking on milk...shake? and I know, value meal!
But is it? Is it really a strain of logic to want to smooth out an IPA’s sharp edges with a little sweetness? And once you do that, is it any different than adding marshmallow and graham cracker to that chocolatey beer? Omnipollo, I should point out, has already created a s’mores IPA, with the head-scratching addition of mango. Decadent Ales out of New York has its own S’mores IPA on shelves now, too; its beers feel very Scandinavian, shades of Omnipollo and Mikkeller.
So is it that much of a stretch to throw burger buns (no beef) and fries into the mash tun, add vanilla, and then do another batch of that beer (there’s a canned version that wasn’t Super Sized) with two dry hop additions and even more bun and fries?
Well, yes. It’s still a ridiculous beer. I’m sorry if that makes me a hypocrite, but this beer is cray.
It’s also a pretty decent beer, strangely enough. The vanilla hits your nose and palate throughout, and while the bitterness is more pronounced than I’d like for this style of imperial IPA, it’s not entirely out of place. And way at the bottom of the pour, once the beer has warmed a little and the suspension starts to break ever so slightly, you get just a hint of something savory, a bare reminder that a whole bunch of salty french fries were in this thing.
I drank this beer alongside an actual order of a cheeseburger, fries, and vanilla shake just to put myself in the right frame of mind. There were times when the vanilla in the beer seemed more pronounced than it was in the shake, frankly. Honestly, I think the buns just added a little cloudy sediment to amplify the haze factor. But god help me, it works well enough. If people can be die-hard dip-my-fries-in-shake people — I’m not one, it’s never done it for me — then this beer can exist rationally enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in an 1834 poem called “The Rhodora,” about finding a flower in a place removed from most human appreciation. As he questioned the purpose of Nature creating beauty somewhere remote, the answer came to him:
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being
Emerson will have to pardon me for equating his Rhodora with a french fry IPA, but it has somehow manufactured its own excuse for being, too.
