Everything’s bigger in Mexas…

…but is that necessarily a good thing? In the last few weeks, I’ve been raving about beers with additions of x, y, z (and more besides). The way they surprise you, make you think – or, in my Dad’s case, roll your eyes. I would like to think that I quantified all this gushing enthusiasm with a pretty major caveat – if a beer is multiply-ingrediented, you have to be able to taste it. Otherwise, what’s the point? Sure, there’s the joie de vivre of coming up with weird and wonderful recipes, or rummaging in the back of the cupboard for things to wang into the fermentor. And, of course, until you add these lengthy combinations and fully ferment and condition (and then possibly barrel-age) the results, it’s by no means nailed on that everything will line up for roll call when it comes to the tasting.

But in terms of these ingredients, if you’ve gone to the trouble, shouldn’t they at least trouble the palate? This went through my mind the other night, on sampling a couple of 6.6% porters from Mikkeller, in which one was a label-busting step change upwards from the other. The first – Texas Ranger – is infused with chipotle chillies. The second – Mexas Ranger – contains chillies, spices, almond milk, cocoa, black beans and avocado leaves. After a bit of head-scratching as to whether avocados had leaves – presumably being a plant, they must – tasting both side-by-side revealed an interesting issue. To me (and this is highly subjective, of course), the beer that had the most flavour was Texas Ranger – it’s Mex(ic)an counterpart just didn’t compete.

This might, though, be down to the resonance of the chipotles – smoke-dried jalapeños have such a powerfully earthy flavour to them. I often talk about a beer tasting ‘roasty’ (even though it isn’t a word), but by this I usually mean something like deep, dark bitter chocolate. However, chipotles taste like the actual roasting process itself – charred, slightly sweet, very smokey. In a porter, this gives such a depth of flavour. The chillies in the Mexas Ranger (which are listed only as just that, no indication of whether they are chipotles or not), don’t have that same complexity; what they do have instead, is heat. With the cocoa, it results in a sweet chocolatey chilli, like those sachets that always get left to the end in multi-packs of Christmas drinking chocolate.

Mexas Ranger is a good beer though; it’s just a pity there’s not more about it. The un-named ‘spices’ do come into play, but only faintly. The avocado leaves, almond milk and black beans aren’t evident at all. But then, would the latter of these really give anything anyway? It’s a similar story to the afore-mentioned eye-rolling Pilot/Elixir sumac saison, which contained cous cous – aka ‘tasteless misery sand‘ – an ingredient which tastes of nothing even when steeped in hot water for a few minutes, let alone being boiled for the best part of an hour. So maybe I should cut Mikkel and the team wherever Mexas was produced a little slack. But if a brewer uses a dozen ingredients, shouldn’t we get to taste them all?

Do you always need to get as much out of a beer as what the brewer puts in?