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Glitter beer? Say what now?
There was a time not so long ago when most beer tasted the same. Americanized pilsners dominated the beer landscape and the few other beers available were either imported or from small local operations, such as Anchor Brewing. The modern craft beer era brought a wave of English-style ales, followed by hefeweizen, IPAs and other re-imagined traditional beer styles.
But brewers were just getting started. They cranked up the hop levels, and imperial IPA and triple IPA were born. Sour beers may not have been everybody’s cup of beer, but interest just kept growing. Breweries began aging beer in barrels, and experimented with herbs, spices, vegetables and anything anyone could think of.
And now, with 6,372 breweries across the U.S., brewmasters are looking for ever-more creative ways to stand out. We’ve seen that with the hazy IPAs taking the beer world by storm this year. So say hello to the newest trend: glitter beer.
As the name suggests, these beers are beautiful; imagine a glass filled with swirling, shimmering golden stars. These beers don’t taste any different — brewers are simply adding an edible, tasteless glitter to their IPAs and blonde ales — but they are a spectacle.
When I first heard about glitter beers, I immediately thought of Goldschläger, a spendy Swiss cinnamon schnapps that contains very thin flakes of floating gold. But brewers are using fine glitter dust, which stays in suspension longer and creates the eye-popping effect that makes the beer so popular. The dust isn’t added during the brewing process, but at the end, just as it’s being packaged, primarily into kegs. So finding it on tap is definitely the way to go.
No one is sure about glitter beer’s origins, but a leading candidate is Cat Wiest, who was the brewer at Santa Cruz’s Seabright Brewing in 2016. (She’s since moved on to Oregon’s Pelican Brewing.) Alexandra Nowell, formerly at Drake’s and now at Inglewood’s Three Weavers brewery, is another glitter beer pioneer.
So where you can taste it? Glitter beer can be a bit challenging to find, primarily because it’s on draft only and requires care in serving to get the full effect. It’s the unicorn of beer. So that means only the more committed beer bars are likely to carry them regularly. But several San Francisco breweries have been making them, including Cellarmaker, Black Hammer Brewing and Barebottle Brewing, and the beer’s sparkly fame is spreading.
Ask for a glitter beer at your favorite watering hole and enjoy the show.
Contact Jay R. Brooks at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com.
