flavored malt beverage

Both of these beers are brewed with spruce tips. We’ve heard very little about spruce tips and so we wanted to see what this ingredient is all about. The first example is Alaskan Ale Brewed with Spruce Tips, brewed by Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, Alaska. This is not some newfangled concoction. The label for the second example, Steamworks Spruce Goose Ale, explains that beer with spruce goes all the way back to the Vikings. It says:

Beers brewed with Spruce, and other varieties of Pine, were introduced to Scotland by the Vikings. They would spike beers with fresh Spruce Tips prior to long journeys and before battle. … This, our modern day version, is pin-bright, complex and sprucy with a big mouth feel.

Captain Cook carried “spruce beer” on his voyages because spruce was a good source of vitamin C and helped prevent scurvy. Wiki further explains that “spruce has been a traditional flavoring ingredient throughout the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere where it is found, often substituting for ingredients not otherwise available, such as hops.”

There are plenty of beers with jalapeno-type peppers. Cave Creek Chili Beer goes back at least 17 years. Here is an early approval, and a recent one. But we think beers with peppercorn-type peppers are less common. Here are two. Allagash is practically a meal because it’s made with grain, sweet potatoes and black pepper. Lip Stinger is Ale Fermented with Peppercorn.

Once upon a time, the federal government prohibited the disclosure of alcohol content on malt beverage labels. The rationale was to protect public health by discouraging brewers from competing in “strength wars,” to sell more product. It took years of persistence by Coors Brewing Company and a ruling from the Supreme Court in 1995 to persuade TTB (then ATF) to allow the practice. Did the strength wars ever materialize, once the rules changed? Among the major brewers, not really. In fact, we noted that there is war of a different kind — increasingly lighter beers (in alcohol and caloric content) from Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. But the craft beer movement appears to have its own strength war.  “Extreme beers” — beers with intense flavors and alcohol contents at three, four or even five times the amounts in a typical American lager — help small brewers stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. And yes, they have many more calories too. Boston Beer Company offers one of the strongest beers available for sale in the United States, with their Utopias, at 24% alc./vol. and a whopping 732 calories per 12 ounce serving (as per Skilnik). Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s 2002 release of World Wide Stout is listed at 23.04% alc./vol. and has approximately 666 calories per 12...