Bad Ideas In Brewing – Mexican Insect Beer

Hey, no one’s perfect…as we at American Craft Beer understand better than most. That said, there are some brewing ideas that should never have happened. And this is definitely one of them.

We will never be big fans of Corn Dog and Funnel Cake Beer.  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 bad brewing concepts, ideas that nobody was asking for and nobody needs, a beer brewed with crickets is a sobering stunner.

Here’s The Deal

Two Mexican businessmen have created an insect-based beer that they named La Grilla (The Cricket) a dark Mexican ale with an eye toward encouraging the consumption of insects as a creative alternative amid the climate crisis.

The idea of using crickets as the raw material for a beer arose in the central Mexican city of Queretaro when Santena, a company that offers assorted insect-based food products, approached Alejandro Rivera, a founding partner of Mexican craft brewer Cerveceria Punto Medio, about the possibility of brewing an insect beer.

Santena general manager Patricio Gutierrez, suggested using ground crickets in the beer, and when no one had the courage to say no, another BAD IDEA IN BREWING was born.

After months of testing the team decided that processed crickets taste similar to barley or rye, so they replaced part those grains used in beer production with the pulverized insects.

“We went for a dark beer,” Rivera told La Prensa Latina. ‘And we decided to toast the crickets, replacing 5 percent of the toasted malt with toasted crickets. The beer takes on a very dark color with this toasted (aspect) like coffee or cocoa.”

And now the insect beer concept has been unleashed upon the world and we fear there’s no turning back.

Bottom Line

American Craft Beer is as concerned about the climate crisis as anyone, but not so concerned that we’d ever order a beer made with toasted crickets.

We’ve long taken the position that anything that crawls on six legs, can leap and has tentacles should NEVER be in your beer, whether deliberately or by mistake.

And in spite of its attention grabbing aspects and an escalating climate crisis, we can’t imagine the “insect beer style” moving far beyond Central Mexico no matter how protein rich powdered crickets are supposed to be.

In the pantheon of BAD IDEAS IN BREWING a Mexican Dark Ale brewed with toasted crickets is right up there with Stag Semen Stout. And we can only hope that misguided beer experiments like these stop now for the sake of sanity and civilization…

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