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Cricket Dark Ale
Hey, no one’s perfect…as we at American Craft Beer understand better than most. That said, there are some brewing ideas out there that are insanely misguided. So welcome to another BAD IDEAS IN BREWING…and we’re blaming a Japanese company that makes soy sauce with crickets for this one.
We will never be big fans of Corn Dog and Funnel Cake Beer. Or preposterous concepts like Beer Tea. Hatchet Hurling Bars will always be a bad idea. And we’d drink a growler of windshield washer fluid before we’d ever submit to an atrocity like Deer Antler Beer.
But in the world of brewing concepts, ideas that nobody was asking for and nobody needs, beer brewed with roasted crickets is a sobering stunner.
Here’s The Deal
Join Earth Ltd, the Tokyo startup known for its cricket-based soy sauce, has teamed up with northwest Japan’s Tono Brewing to create what it claims to be the world’s first craft beer made with crickets.
Crafted using farmed crickets that are carefully roasted along with the malt, Cricket Dark Ale boasts big coffee, cacao, chamomile and cricket(!) aromatics, a creamy caramel cricket mouthfeel and a slightly bitter finish that lingers like cockroaches under your sink.
(Roasted cricket and malt, both fragrant)
But the beer’s real secret, according to Join Earth, who specialize in insect food creation, is the beer’s specially domesticated crickets.
Unlike the crickets that haunt many urban centers, these crickets were raised under optimum temperature and humidity controlled conditions on a bucolic insect farm in central Japan, where they feasted on vegetables before being harvested, washed and roasted.
Join Earth found the perfect partner for its Cricket Dark Ale in Tono Brewing which according to a press release had long been focusing on the possibility of brewing a beer with raw insect matter (!).
Bottom Line
It has long been American Craft Beer’s position that anything that crawls on six legs, can leap and has tentacles should NEVER be in your beer, whether deliberately or by mistake.
But in spite of its obviously attention grabbing aspects, we can’t imagine the insect beer style moving beyond a core Japanese audience, already enthralled by foods like Basashi (horse meat) and eel-flavored cola.
Still, in the pantheon of BAD IDEAS IN BREWING Cricket Dark Ale is right up there…no matter how protein rich it is. And we can only hope that things stop here for the sake of sanity and our civilization…
That idea not a bad enough for you?
How about these?
BAD IDEAS IN BREWING – BEER MILKSHAKES
