Pickle Dan Rye Ale by Dainton Brewery

I’ll warn you now, this week’s beer is a weird one, Pickle Dan Rye Ale from Dainton Brewery.  I’ll add a few more additional prefaces as well before proceeding.  This is a weird beer.  There’s no two ways about it.  It’s also not one of my absolute favourites (like most of the beers I usually share) but I do very much like it.  So that combined with its oddity led me to write about it today.

I’ll say right up front that this is the type of beer I usually dislike.  On first glance it looks like a beer that was made just so the brewer could highlight how funky, out there, and cutting edge their beers are, as opposed to just trying to make a beer that tastes good.  The one thing that made me try it was that it was from Dainton, who have earned a whole heap of benefit of the doubt based on the quality of pretty much every other one of their beers I’ve tried.

And I’m glad I did.  My apologies as you’re probably going to be pretty frustrated with my lack of ability to adequately describe how this beer tastes.  Before I tried it, these were flavours that I was unable to reconcile in my head.  And now that I have tried it, I still struggle to actually relate how it does work.  But the key point here is that it works! 

You can definitely taste the pickles (as the can indicates it is brewed with a whole heap of actual real pickles).  But through some brewing trickery, the pickle flavour melds in a lovely complementary way with the rye ale.  It’s not like the pickle completely disappears into the beer.  You definitely never forget you’re drinking a pickle flavoured beer.  But somehow this beer convinces your taste buds that the words ‘pickle flavoured beer’ form a perfectly normal everyday phrase.

Unfortunately, that’s about as good as I can do in terms of telling you how this beer tastes. If you’re a bit wary of the increasing strangeness of the newest craft beer offerings out there, I’m totally with you.  The crazy flavourings and combinations that were clearly never going to work are everywhere these days.  But this is one that’s worth a crack.  Because every now and then, one of those super weird flavour combos, in the hands of a skilled brewer, actually work and make a tasty beer.  And Pickle Dan is definitely one of those.