My question exactly: What's the Big Dill? By Half Fast Brewing Co.

When I initially saw this beer in a cooler at MoonRidge Brewery up in Cornell, I was puzzled just like William of Baskerville at the death of Adelmo. Why would they be carrying the brews of another brewery and who was this Half Fast Brewing Company anyway? I then looked that the label and saw that the Half Fast Brewing was, just like MoonRidge, veteran owned. Aha!

Half Fast, the business entity, at least, lists their address as being in Spring Valley, Wisconsin which is west of Menomonie. The can indicated that the beer, however, was brewed in Osseo which I presume meant at Northwoods Brewing which had closed just a few months previously. But perhaps just to the public. Maybe they contract brew now. I mean, how can Walter's just disappear again? Have the Gen Zers of Eau Claire and Trempealeau counties have no sense of tradition? Or maybe, just maybe the beer predated the brewery's closure. After all, there was no canned on/best by date to be found.

Having so much Central and Eastern European blood in me, I have a taste for pickle beer which no doubt seems odd to anyone who doesn't know me and of what stock I come from. Heck, it's even strange to me. Still, I bought a can of Half Fast's What's the Big Dill?, a pickle Gose.

Like all kinds of foods do, What's the Big Dill? fell victim to the dark color of my desk and so it looks gold in the photo but it's really a straw hue. It was clear with a smattering of bubbles. My pour produced a big head of loose, white foam. I was quite surprised by the aroma which was sweet and redolent of pineapple, of all things. I also knew that this just couldn't be good. Maybe not horrible because I don't think of a pineapple smell as being indicative of spoilage or any such thing but maybe someone got their flavoring bottles mixed up.

My tongue was greeted by a nice fizziness and the beer had a light body as expected. Then, inexplicably, came the pineapple. How blatantly odd. Thankfully it wasn't sweet, just a full fruity flavor. This was followed by some pickle taste. I spent a couple minutes pondering the tropical fruit flavor here - I suppose it could have come from a hop - and then it occurred to me that it was ostensibly a Gose. Was there any salinity? Of course on my next sip I tasted a bit so I am unsure if it was there all along but my tastebuds got sidetracked by pineapple or if I only tasted salt because I knew it to be a part of the Gose style and was not fully cognizant of this. Was my tongue playing tricks on me?

Regardless, the beer was lacking in the sour department. Pickles implies being pickled in vinegar and I just tasted nothing tangy/sour.

That odd pineapple-pickle combo lingered on the finish before the hops gently laid them to rest with a wave of dryness and a bit of bitterness.

This was one weird beer. It was also just not good. While the light body is par for the Gose course, the flavors, especially the pickle, were very mellow and the whole beer just came across as a watery mess. Where's the tanginess? Why is the dill pickle flavor so paltry? I'll likely try another Half Fast if given the opportunity but this one won't get a repeat.

Junk food pairing: With a paucity of pickle and Half Fast's proximity to Minnesota, pair What's the Big Dill? with a bag of  Old Dutch's Spicy Dill Pickle chips to boost the pickle quotient and get a little zip to boot.

Pickle beer Texas style: BestMaid Sour Pickle Beer by Martin House Brewing

Just when I thought the only pickle beer I had left to try (that I could find in Madison, that is) was Destihl's, I stumble upon this brew.

While, perhaps not surprisingly, I found this beer down in exurban Chicago, it is a little bit of the Lone Star State that made its way up north. The brewer, Martin House Brewing, and the, um, flavoring conspirator, BestMaid, are both denizens of Ft. Worth. To the best of my knowledge, neither company distributes their products here in Wisconsin but I may be wrong. It's true, I haven't gone around town to survey the pickle scene so you might find BestMaid at WalMart or some other national chain. When I need my fix, I head over to the Woodman's pickle/horseradish/sauerkraut cooler where I generally grab a jar of Claussen's spears.

(If any Madison area folks know of a local fermentorium that makes a good, crunchy pickle, please let me know.)

In an earlier pickle beer review, I prognosticated that some brewer somewhere would take the humble style and twist and contort it into something beyond a light beer with brine or pickle flavoring added. It seems that Martin House is exactly the brewer I feared. Their website features a photograph of a pickle beer variety pack with four variations of the beer that have been "fruited" with orange, blackberry, lemonade, and strawberry, respectively. Given that the plain stuff, which I bought, is alloyed with natural flavoring, I suspect none of these beers have been within a mile of any real fruit.

A previous variety pack included four different flavors: spicy pickle, bread-n-butters, Bloody Mary, and chamoy drip. I had to investigate this last one and found that chamoy sauce is a Mexican condiment made from dried fruits and chili powder giving a sweet-salty zip. While the sauce sounds very tasty, I would hesitate to put that beer to my lips and am still wondering why it's "drip" instead of "dip" or "sauce". Bonus points, however, for making a beer with regional character. Further research into Martin House's brewing activities turned up watermelon, grape punch, and tequila barrel aged spicy pickle beer varieties. Those folks down in Ft. Worth are keen to run this style into the ground. Surely a beef flavored version is forthcoming for the true Texas experience.

Luckily I am dealing with the plain Jane stuff. It seems to be a kettle-soured brew with natural flavoring added.

Sorry about the photo. I somehow did not keep the one that was actually in focus.

My pour produced a big, loose white head that was quite volatile - like soda. Bubbles carelessly rushed upwards and popped in a fizzy frenzy. The liquid was a brilliant yellow with a slight haze to it. There was a fair number of bubbles inside. My nose caught sour dill pickle brine and a nebulous sweetness that I couldn't identify.

The first sip revealed a light body with a large payload of sour pickle flavor. There was also a moderate saline taste and a rather prominent sweetness which was so, I believe, because there wasn't much fizz. The finish found the sour pickle taste lingering until the next sip. 

My notes say "not bad". The brewer used a rather heavy hand when applying those natural flavors because the pickle flavors are quite potent. Isn't everything bigger in Texas? When I inhaled while taking a sip, I got this weird rubber band taste. Odd. This quirk aside, the natural flavors here weren't horrible. It's like they didn't take as if they were administered with an eye dropper yet they also didn't have a sharp, brisk taste like real brine. Nor was there any hint of the floral along with the green taste of dill.

All in all, not bad.

Junk food pairing: Pair your BestMaid Sour Pickle Beer with either BBQ flavored potato chips or their rare cousin, a beef flavored chip.

Oklahoma O.K.: Spicy Pickle Monster by Prairie Artisan Ales

Until just about 15 minutes ago I thought that Prairie Artisan Ales was out of St. Louis. There I was, typing away and thinking about how it was a place we didn't visit  on our St. Louis trip back in 2017. I discovered that, in fact, it's an Oklahoma brewery and that I had cornfused them with Perennial Artisan Ales which is, in fact, in The Gateway City. Do any other Sooner State breweries distribute here in Wisconsin

I hope that I can be forgiven because Oklahoma is one of the more nondescript states in the Union. At least it is from my vantage sitting here in the Upper Midwest. When I think of Oklahoma, beer does not come to mind. It's almost as if beer actively avoids associating itself with the Sooner State. Instead, I know it for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that bears its name and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. Fairly or not, I believe that Texas has a lock on the popular imagination when it comes to the likes of cowboys, oil, and steak. Sure, parts of Oklahoma belong to the Great Plains but, really, that's Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. It exists in this liminal state between the Plains and Texas. Like I said, nondescript.

During my exhaustive interweb searches about Prairie Artisan Ales' home, I discovered that Sooners love their fried onion burgers. From what I can tell, the Oklahoma fried onion burger is no mere hamburger with fried onions on top but rather its unique terroir comes from frying up a bed of onions and then flattening a ball of ground beef on top of it so that the marriage of the caramelized onion essence and the beefy goodness is consummated with all due haste. And that's a good thing, if you ask me. However, I was not able to find out which onion one should use. Yellow? White? Red? Vidalia?

Now, you may recall my previous pickle beer review in which I postulated that some craft brewer somewhere would move beyond the brine/sour/spicy paradigm which prevails in the pickle beer world today. Well, Perennial Prairie Artisan Ales has done just that with their Spicy Pickle Monster.

I do not see the words "natural flavors" anywhere on the label. Instead it's a "sour ale with spicy dill pickles..." - familiar territory so far - "...orange, lemon, and lime". Citrus! They've added citrus! Not totally out of left field, I suppose, with lime cucumber being a not unheard of combination. (Beware lime cucumber Gatorade!) Let's try out this novel take on the venerable(?!) pickle beer.

Cerveza de los muertos!

However it may have tasted, I was impressed with how Spicy Pickle Monster looked. A big white head snapped and popped as it churned its way down to the bright yellow liquid that had just a tinge of haze. A fair number of bubbles were rushing up to meet the foam. Taking a sniff, I found that dill came first followed by something sweet that I finally decided was akin to orange juice. Then I noticed a briney salinity which paired well with the lime I also smelled. To top things off, there was a bit of the floral in there too. Except for the floral element, all the scents were rather pungent which made for some fine sniffin'.

Unsurprisingly, I tasted a beer with a light body. Fizziness was a little on the light side. A very healthy Gose level of salinity and a big dash of tartness stood out immediately. As I savored my sips, I tasted a wealth of flavors: some dill, a citrus medley that would make 7UP green with envy, and a modicum of grainy sweetness. Cutting through it all was a low-level dose of spicy heat from habanero, it seems, that gradually gained in strength with each sip.

That spiciness and all those citrus flavors prevailed on the finish. A little tartness came through, but not much and the dill popped up too, if only briefly. I will note also that, while the heat built with successive sips, it eventually plateaued at a decidedly non-lethal point.

The big surprise here for me was that the dill (i.e. - pickle flavor) seemed happy out of the spotlight and content to be part of the gustatory ensemble. I would like to have had a tad more of the dill flavor but, when Spicy Pickle Monster breaches the 50 degree mark, you can taste all of the flavors mingling with one another with no one taste overpowering the rest. A bit like a good album mix where each instrument and voice is up in the mix but they all have room to breathe and be heard. Same here. The flavors are all discernible and more or less stand on equal footing yet they blend together for a greater whole.

A fine take on the pickle beer that deftly orchestrates a symphony of flavors. No doubt it would be a good companion to an Oklahoma fried onion burger.

Junk food pairing: If you really want to go for excess, then grab a bag of Old Dutch Spicy Dill Pickle Chips. Personally, I prefer leaning into the fried onion burger motif and instead have plenty of Old Dutch Onion & Garlic chips on hand when I savor a Spicy Pickle Monster.

Always juicy. Always beery.: Pickle Beer by Oliphant Brewing

The pickle beer is the picotrend that just won't die. There seems to be two, maybe three, versions that are available more or less year-round with just enough breweries whipping one up periodically to keep Madison shelves fairly well stocked with this oddball style most of the time. If Donna's straight-ahead approach of adding brine to beer just doesn't cut it, you can go with a (likely extremely) sour take on it courtesy of Destihl. Those tartness-loving folks down in Illinois even have a spicy version of their sour pickle beer.

My gut tells me that American craft brewers aren't done with tinkering with the style. I wouldn't be surprised to see a pickle beer that had been aged in vodka barrels at some point. Beyond that, my imagination is strained but, no doubt, some lunatic at a craft brewery somewhere will concoct a pickle beer with Nashville hot chicken or other ingredients I dare not even fathom.

Up until now, my pickle beer purview has been dominated by Illinois breweries making this one the first from Wisconsin to cross my path. Oliphant is up north in the west central part of Wisconsin, perilously close to Minnesota. I have enjoyed the beers that I've tasted by them and appreciated greatly that they brewed a gruit and aren't afraid to smoke things up on occasion. It's just that Oliphant tends to brew a lot of beers that don't appeal to me (or sends those down to Madison) so my bouts of sampling are few and far between. Plus, their labels look a lot like those from The Brewing Projekt, a brewery that, as far as I can tell, took the trendiness of making beer fruity tasting to an extreme where they seem to view malt as a baleful intruder upon their endeavor to make beer indistinguishable from Hawaiian Punch.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have bought this stuff had I not been gripped by the pickle beer madness. The label described it as a lager with natural flavors which I took to mean a light American lager with, well, flavoring added. Bummer. I'd rather that there be at least some brine in there rather than just Pickle Brine #304 from Amoretti.

Oliphant's Pickel Beer had a really nice white head that effervesced like soda. Sadly, this meant it dissipated fast and my meager photography skills were barely able to capture any. The liquid was quite clear and was a nice light yellow in color. I spied a few bubbles inside. As expected, a pickle brine scent came first and it was followed by lemon candy and some kind of floral dishwashing soap smell.

Its light-medium body was a touch heavier than I expected for a 4% American light lager. A mellow fizziness let some fine malty smoothness through that brought a pickle brine flavor as well as an unexpected burst of sweetness. The briney taste lingered for a bit on the finish before yielding to faint bitterness and a dash of tartness.

This stuff wasn't bad if quaffed very cold and with celerity. Otherwise the pickle brine bit tasted like flavoring and not brine. The malty sweetness threw me off too. It wasn't particularly sweet but its presence was jarring because there just wasn't anything sharp tasting for contrast - too little tartness, not enough salinity, a paucity of fizz.

This just was not my cup of brine.

Junk food pairing: Add more salt and pickle goodness with a bag of Jays Sour n'Dill potato chips to go with the pickle beer from St. Croix County.

Citra? Simcoe? Mosaic? What are those?

A couple recent beers that I've had.

The pickle beer shortages continue

I ran into another empty pickle beer shelf yesterday. This time it was at Willy Street Coop North and it was the Destihl's Dill Pickle Sour Beer that was apparently sold right out.

Pickle beer supply chain problem?

While at the Woodman's in Sun Prairie last weekend, I noticed that they were clean out of Donna's Pickle Beer.

Is the stuff selling like hotcakes? Or had they finally sold that last six pack that had been on the shelf for months?

Pickle beers are movin' on up

I see that the Willy Street Coop-North has a pickle beer section. It's only 2 brews, at the moment, but that just means there's room to grow.

So how's that pickle beer marathon going?: Pickle Someone Your Own Size by Noon Whistle Brewing

My first encounter with a so-called "pickle beer" came last autumn when my Frau and I made a stop in at Noon Whistle Brewing down in lovely Lombard, Illinois one night. Because I am open minded and willing to try any old thing brewers come up with, no matter how far out in left field it may be, I bought a small pour of their dill pickle sour ale on a whim.

Just kidding.

I don't really know why I gave their pickle beer a whirl but I suspect it was because the more normal beers of theirs that I had tried up to that point were not good. It's like they spend all their effort perfecting "gummy beers" which I presume are meant to inspire images and all the good feelings of Gummi bears dancing on your tongue. Or something like that. Perhaps my logic was, since Noon Whistle does not, um, do well with malt flavors and I don't want my beer to taste like candy, let's try something else.

 

In the end, I found that I rather liked the pickle beer. Yeah, it was definitely gimmicky but I enjoyed the briney savoriness and the sour was just the right strength of tanginess. I could sense the spirits of my German, Polish, and Ruthenian ancestors looking over my shoulders and rolling their eyes at the novelty aspect of the beer but appreciating that at least there were pickles involved. They were probably also wondering where the Korn and/or vodka was.

Fast forward several months and I stumble upon Donna's Pickle Beer at the store and make a life-altering decision there on the spot: I resolve to drink every pickle beer I can find.

Ere long I discover Destihl's SuckerPunch, their dill pickle sour beer, on the shelves here in Madison. But I shy away from it. From my experience, their sour beers are extremely sour and render your tongue inoperable for a while after just a sip or two. While I did resolve to drink every pickle beer I could find, I did not set any deadlines and, instead, did some major procrastinating on that one.

Then came a trip down to Chicagoland back in October and a stop in at a Binny's where I found the beer that started all of this: Noon Whistle's Pickle Someone Your Own Size.

 

The brew was slightly hazy but I am unsure why. My first thought is that it was made with wheat but I can neither confirm nor deny that. Noon Whistle notes the hops involved but not the grains. Of course. My pour produced a big, white head that was all effervescent like soda with an audible din of bubbles bursting. They burst so much that the foam dissipated fairly quickly. I spied some bubbles inside - not counting the ones stuck to the side of my glass.

As expected, the beer smelled a lot like what you get when you smell a jar of pickles. You know, briney and dilly. But there was also a prominent lemony-citrus aroma too. I put this down to the lactic sour but apparently the Simcoe hops here also add fruity scents.

My tongue was greeted by a good, but not strong, fizziness and a light body. That lemon aroma came through but, again, I attributed it to the sour and not hops. It didn't take long for the citrus taste to give way to dill pickle. While there was a definite astringency to the taste, it was orders of magnitude less than the xenomorph blood that Destihl makes.

The tanginess and dill slowly ebbed away on the finish as a savory/saline quality joined the fading dill.

I gave it all away above so it's no surprise when I type that I really enjoy this beer. It's light, rather fizzy, and tastes like pickle brine with a touch of citrus. I brought a couple cans of this stuff to gaming one day and they went down in quick succession. Easy drinking and flavorful for someone like me with lots of Germanic and Slavic blood in him.

Junk food pairing: Go all post-modern and start deconstructing a classic dish like the hamburger by pairing your Pickle Someone Your Own Size with a bag of Herr's Ketchup flavored potato chips.

N.B. - ketchup is not appropriate on hot dogs.

I think vegetables can be very good in beer, don’t you?: Donna's Pickle Beer by Pilot Project Brewing

What is the next smallest prefix after pico? That may be an accurate description of the trend that is pickle beers.

I tried one from Noon Whistle last autumn, which I rather liked, and have seen one from Destihl on shelves here in Madison, although I now see 2 versions on their webpage - the regular and the spicy. What is it with Illinois breweries and pickle beers? If I recall correctly, there were a few at the Great Taste of the Midwest last year but I didn't sample any such brews. I merely recall hearing tell of them on that den of iniquity that is Twitter.

On a recent venture out to Brennan's in search of new/fresh beer from Jack's Abby and anything by Dovetail that is not brewed year-round, I stumbled across Donna's Pickle Beer. (As near as I can tell, Jack's Abby has left the state and Dovetail only delivers non-annuals to select joints around town.) I believe that it is now easier to find a pickle beer in this town than it is a smoked beer. Surely this is one of the seven seals and it is now broken.

Donna's Pickle Beer is brewed by Pilot Project Brewing, a brewery that, I presume, provides space for others to come on in and brew. It apparently originated in Chicago but now also has an incubator in Milwaukee. Donna's is the brainchild of Scott Baird and Joshua Jancewicz and is named after Jancewicz's mother. Donna the beer is made with the "original brine recipe" of Donna the woman.

While there is definitely a high gimmickry factor at play here, Donna's stands out because it's an American lager and not a sour ale like the other pickle beers I've seen and tasted. In addition, dill pickles don't taste like tropical fruit so it gets points from me for that.

Why yes, I did garnish my pickle beer with a pickle. But I also did some tasting without a spear of flavor intensity. I wish I'd had slices so I could have perched them atop the rim. And, now that I think about it, I should have put a toothpick through the spear and rested it so that some of the pickle was visible above the head. Well, I guess I didn't want to block the garden gnome's face too much.

My pour produced a lovely, loose head of white foam that went away quickly. Reminded me of soda. The beer of pickle was exactly what you'd expect from an "American lager" which I now take to mean a Bud/Miller/Coors clone-like thingy: clear, yellow, and fizzy. You know what it smells like when you put your nose above a jar of pickles and take a sniff? This stuff smelled like that. I don't think that having the pickle spear in there changed the aroma very much. It made it bolder but not really different qualitatively.

The beer had a light body and - quelle surprise! - tasted like pickle brine. Enough saltiness to enhance the flavor but not enough to make it salty like a Dead Sea(TM) Gose. I couldn't discern the grain but I suspect it made the beer a bit fuller tasting than it would have been otherwise. I also couldn't taste anything really tangy. They didn't try to compensate for the vinegar's absence and left something just savory. The finish too was pickle briny. Maybe a trace of the Noble hops that the ad copy says are in there but just a trace of something spicy.

As with the aroma, having a pickle in the beer seemed merely to enhance what was already there and not change the flavor to something different. The unadulterated version of this stuff was light with a moderate dill pickle brine taste. It wasn't faint but it also wasn't like drinking out of a pickle jar either. Adding a spear just make it more briney, more pungent.

I thoroughly enjoyed Donna's Pickle Beer. Being mostly of German and Slavic stock, I am all over dill pickles. Without garnish, this beer is light and refreshing with enough pickle taste to let you know that it's there but not so much that you think you've been involved in an accident at the Vlasic factory.

Junk food pairing: Grab a six-pack of Donna's Pickle Beer and then a bag of Old Dutch Spicy Dill Pickle potato chips to drown in dilly gluttony.