Cucumber Beers Courtesy of
10 Barrel Brewing Co.
Portland OR
Many of us have had beers brewed with coffee, with orange or
grapefruit, with smoked grains, and with a wide range of other spices and
fruits. With many of these flavorful things, the almost universal appeal of the
added ingredient — say, chocolate or coconut or watermelon — makes the beer
itself attractive to consumers.
With all that said, I have been puzzling for some time over
a quiet brewing trend of making cucumber beers. I say quiet, because cucumber
beers are definitely not a craze but are certainly a “thing.” Breweries around
the country have been doing this for about five years — and I have not yet
tasted one. We are seeing this almost sugarless fruit, characterized by that
familiar watery crunch, in light-colored, low-alcohol beers — especially
saisons, kolsches, pilsners and kettle sours. After all, a rich stout or
probably even an IPA would bury the, um, flavor of the cucumber.
If you want to taste one of these beers — and that is
probably a big “if” — it won’t necessarily be easy. Via phone calls and
Internet searching, I hunted much of the Bay Area for a locally made cucumber
beer and didn’t make much progress. Fieldwork Brewing Co., the
too-cool-for-school Berkeley-based brewery known for its hazy IPAs and its rich
milk and coconut stouts, has made a cucumber beer — a farmhouse ale of 5
percent alcohol-by-volume. So has Rare Barrel, also in Berkeley Cigar
City in Tampa ,
Florida ; Uinta in Salt
Lake City , Flat12 Bierwerks in Indianapolis
I haven’t tasted one, but I did have a close encounter with
one. I found it at a Safeway in San Anselmo — the Cucumber Crush from 10
Barrel, the “craft” brewery owned by the Budweiser company. I looked, but I
didn’t touch. That’s this brewery, owned by about the biggest beer maker in the
world, is outrageously priced — $15 for a six-pack. Sorry — not worth it for a
5 percent alcohol-by-volume beer made with the most meekly flavored of fruits.
So, I went home and read about the beer. Reviewers on RateBeer.com noted the
beer being grassy and tart, with a powerful scent of watermelon, summer squash,
Jolly Rancher and cucumber. A few critiques, and I was sated.
Other beer writers are impressed by the style, though. Draft
magazine wrote an undated review of six cucumber beers, in which the author
observed that “cuke flavor has a soothing, chill-out quality that makes it a
favorite addition to ice water at your neighborhood spa. That same sensation
can be employed to great effect in the right beer.” The same magazine, in 2012,
called a cucumber beer from Cigar
City
I don’t even care much for eating cucumbers, and salads are
one of my favorite things to have for dinner. I even wonder if cucumbers fail
to inspire the brewers who use them. Often, breweries make them once. Several
years ago, Sierra Nevada and a handful of
other breweries made a collaboration beer featuring wild rice, beets, mint,
carrots, alfalfa honey, driftwood and cucumber. Called Repoterroir, the
one-time beer came and went, as, perhaps, cucumber beers should do.
by Alastair Bland, Marin Independent Journal
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