Sometimes, a brewer wants to make a beer that doesn’t fit into the the established color spectrums. In California, one particular brewer wants to make a pink beer, and has taken some unconventional steps involving bugs to achieve that shade.
These bugs, specifically Dactylopius coccus—also known as cochineal—have been used for centuries to create textile dyes. They’re native to Central and South America where they feed on the crimson juices of the prickly pear cactus. The pea-sized bugs are harvested from the broad pads of the nopal cactus, then dried and crushed to create the pigment, carmine. While the use of carmine as a fabric dye has been largely supplanted by synthetic dyes, it is still used in foods from sausages to candy to juices, where it’s often referred to as “natural red 4,” “crimson lake,” or simply “cochineal extract.” They were also famously used in Campari until a few years ago.
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A brewer’s color palette usually comprises different types of malted grain that’s been kilned, or roasted, or cured, or otherwise dried in different ways—each with it’s own impact on the final color of the beer. Hence, beer normally falling on the spectrum of amber, brown, red or black.
“I just really love the color pink and I always wanted to make pink beer,” says Melanie Pierce—The Community Outreach Director for Los Angeles based charity The Keep A Breast Foundation. Pierce is also a fixture in the Southern California craft beer scene: she’s worked at the highly celebrated brewpub, Pizza Port, and the pioneering Eagle Rock Brewery. But six years ago, Pierce started an annual beer festival in San Diego known as the The Brewbies Fest, which helps raise funds for breast cancer awareness.
Pierce collaborates with different local breweries to create pink beers for a good cause, many of which create their own pink beers for the event, but none of theirs are made with bugs.
Of course, Pierce has found other excuses to experiment with pink brew too, like at this year’s Session Fest, a festival dedicated to low-alcohol Session beers, the latest beer trend to hit the American craft beer scene.
Pierce has used pomegranate, hibiscus, raspberries, strawberries, and food coloring to dye her beers.
Pierce has made nearly a dozen different pink beers over the years, but for Session Fest 2015, she envisioned something completely different: a black beer with a bright pink foam based on a dry Irish stout. The style (think Guinness) usually has an opaque black color and creamy, white head. Often nitrogenated to create a velvety texture and that signature cascading foam, dry stouts are full of roasty, hoppy flavors, but are light in body and low in alcohol—perfect for a lengthy drinking session at the pub.
While brainstorming new methods to tint the foam of Eagle Rock breweries brew, Bakofsky remembered a regular at the tasting room who used to mix the brewery’s Belgian witbier with Campari for a vividly scarlet cocktail.
“I thought it sounded nasty,” the brewer admitted. “But then I tried it and I was surprised that the herbal character of the Campari worked with the witbier.” In Campari, that brilliant red hue used to be achieved with these same bugs.
Bags of beer-ready critters were just an internet order away, and just days after the idea was hatched, the dried insects arrived at the brewery.
“They sort of looked like little grey beads,” Bakofsky said. “They’re not the whole bugs. There aren’t legs and antennae—I guess it’s just the abdomen or the thorax… We tasted a couple. Well, I did. Mel [Pierce] didn’t… I was a little apprehensive. They are very bitter and metallic, kind of astringent and funky all at same time. I chewed it up and then spit it [into my fingers], and my fingers were bright red.”
The brewers used between two and four ounces of the cochineal, which they ground up and soaked in alcohol to extract the color. This tincture was then added to the ten gallon batch of stout before the beer was kegged. While the results were not as vibrant as they’d hoped for, the beer was still a striking sight, like the color of a strawberry milkshake.
“[The foam] was a little bit pink,” said Pierce, “but it wasn’t as pink as I wanted it to be.”
“The cool part,” Bakofsky added, “was that even though the beer looked jet black, if you spilled a little bit on a napkin, it looked blood red. The pour looked really cool too—this pinkish, reddish cascade of little bubbles.”
They called the concoction Beetlegeist, and the stout was debuted at Session Fest in May, where the only other hint of its secret ingredient was a cheeky “non-vegan” label on the tap list. As for the taste, the beer tasted like a dry Irish stout, though its sharp, roasty flavor was tinged with a subtle, metallic quality that hinted at the chitinous additive.
“I think so,” Pierce said when asked if the cochineal added any discernable flavor to the brew, “But it’s kinda a mind over matter thing. It’s like when we used beets: if you told people there were beets in [the beer], they’d say ‘cool I can taste them,’ but if you didn’t [tell them], then they can’t taste them.”
Bakofsky agreed, “I wish we had a version without the bugs so we could sit around and test our palates, [but] I like that it could give you a little flavor, otherwise why not just go to the store and get the regular tasteless [food coloring]. Hopefully it gives you something positive and not something grody.”
