What seems nearly commonplace today—adding hot pepper spice into beer—started at the beginning of the modern craft-beer movement. In the 1970s at his New Albion Brewing Co. in Sonoma, California, Jack McAuliffe largely made three styles of beer: a porter, a stout, and a pale ale. Occasionally he’d get creative and drop whole hot peppers into bottles and mark the labels with a drawing of the peppers to signify the spiciness within.
Now, anyone who has ever brewed with fruits and vegetables will caution you against this method, but in the early days, it was revolutionary. Today, it’s safe to say that most of the country’s 5,000 plus breweries have experimented with hot pepper in one way or another. Pilsners with jalapeños, IPAs with habanero, and everything in-between. The annual Great American Beer Festival even has a Chili Beer category, which in 2016 had 112 entries.
There’s a correlation between chile peppers and beer. Both have devoted fans and makers who seek out new varieties and try to create new things from established styles. On the pepper side, there are farmers and scientists blazing toward making the hottest chile peppers in a race to beat the previous heat. On the beer side, brewers are looking to incorporate these flavors but have come to realize that subtlety leads to the sublime. Some forty years after McAuliffe stuffed a pepper into a 12-ounce bottle, capped it, and sent it off the market, Matt Brophy sat down with Ben Clark at the Flying Dog Brewery in Frederick, Maryland, to talk about some new beer ideas.