Don't burn me again

Oh, this again.

Peppers feel like a natural addition to an experience involving beer. The simplest pairing in the book is having a nice mild bodied beer with a spicy dish. But what I don't understand is flattening this experience into the beer without making that beer stand alone. Highlighting the peppers, I feel, is a mistake. 

Lately we've seen the Ballast Point Habanero Sculpin, the Rogue Sriracha Hot Stout Beer, the Jailbreak Scoville Jalapeno IPA, among a litany of other primarily pepper focused experiences. The trouble isn't the choice of including peppers in a beer but the focus of the experience. Perhaps there is even a problem with the choice of peppers to include. American tastes for beer don't tend toward vegetal flavors but jalapenos are distinctly more vegetal than your average smoked pepper. Regardless, a beer that has a primary descriptor of pepper flavors evokes, at least for me, an expectation that I'm about to drink some peppers propped up by some bitterness and sweetness. Every time I give it a shot I leave myself wanting. Meanwhile, imagining the same beer without peppers with a dish that supplies these sensations makes my mouth water.

Rephrasing the experience of peppers and beer is almost always better to my personal tastes. Moving the addition of peppers into the background of the beer is far more attractive to me. For example, Stone's Xocoveza is a complex and gorgeous stout taking a respectful nod to the aztec beverage, xocolatl, which includes peppers. The pasilla peppers they use have a rich and bright character. In the kitchen, they can be used to add a lot of pepper character to a sauce or dish. In beer the pasilla peppers do just that, probably also because it isn't the focus of the Xocoveza but instead expands the experience of the malt, lactose, cocoa, cinnamon, and sweet and earthen hops (goldings and challenger). Peppers are just too strong to be casually used in simple recipes.

My only hope is that this series champions Flying Dog's strengths and doesn't have me slogging through a horizontal that I regret.