Listen: Pickle beers are already a thing. If you haven’t seen one out of any of your local breweries, it may only be a matter of time before they give it a try. Even if we hadn’t noticed this trend anecdotally, an Untappd search turns up more than 1,400 pickle-themed beers.
To ask why people are making pickle beers is to ask the wrong question. Indeed, that is usually the wrong question here, in our Special Ingredient department. This is where we set aside our love of sublime things such as great drinkability and Reinheitsgebot purity to embrace mad science. Insert Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” We could roll that quote like a news-channel chyron over these articles, and it would always fit.
It certainly fits with pickle beer. Here, we don’t ask why. We ask, why the hell not? And—much more interestingly—how?