“Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” — Maxim of the Assassin Order

Screw you Oskar Blues and French’s Mustard for making me do this. Screw you to Matt (yes you, Matt, editing this) for offering to pay me actual money to do it. Screw the 56% of people that responded to my Twitter poll egging me on. Screw my fellow homebrewers from the North East Homebrew Club for peer pressuring me into this. You’re all to blame for this, not me!

Whacky beers are a siren call that I cannot resist, I’m drawn to the gimmick like a magpie to a shiny milk bottle top. Oskar Blues actually put out a homebrew recipe, encouraging this activity. They even hired my teenage celebrity crush Alyson Hannigan to promote the beer; Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is promoting the mustard beer for Hecate’s sake!? How can I resist?

For those of you who have no idea what I’m rambling about, in July 2020 Colorado-based brewery Oskar Blues teamed up with French’s Mustard to release an eponymously named beverage; a tropical wheat beer spiked with French’s Mustard. Any brewery releasing such an unusual sounding beer is surely hoping for a bit of social media hysteria, and boy did they get it.

Beer Twitter went and lost its collective mind. Not since Brexit have people been so divided. The sceptics claimed there were “enough plagues in 2020” and aptly quoted Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm from 1993’s Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think whether they should.” The mustard-o-philes challenged back with “expand your palates you cowards!” Meanwhile, Pellicle editor Matthew Curtis stated, somewhat ominously, “I must have the mustard beer.”

““Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is promoting the mustard beer for Hecate’s sake!? How can I resist.””

The first major challenge for the typical homebrewer is getting hold of the fruit purees in the Oskar Blues recipe. You can’t easily puree limes or lemons at home as the pith is extremely bitter. There are commercially available purees, which I assume is what Oskar Blues used but then the issue is how much fruit am I adding? The recipe calls for .24 Lemon Puree. What does that even mean? .24 of a pound? .24 of an ounce? .24 pounds per gallon? I asked Oskar Blues directly but so far have not received a response. This means my interpretation of the recipe may be a little off the commercial version but without understanding the measurements they’ve used I’ve got to use my best guess.

And they want me to make reverse osmosis water for this beer? For a mustard beer. Oh, of course, a few parts per million of magnesium in my water supply is going to completely ruin this beer! A 90-minute boil on a session beer with only one hop addition, why? Just why? If it’s to up the gravity for this strength of beer, it’s far easier to just add a little bit more malt.

A 142 gram primer? That’s potentially going to cause some bottle geysers. Such an addition is only usually used for a hefeweizen, and then only with good quality, thick glass bottles to ensure they can hold the pressure. The most I would ever normally use is around 90g for a higher carbonated style.

Frankly, the recipe needed stripping back and made a hell of a lot of more user friendly. This is what I came up with:

RECIPE

Target Original Gravity (OG) — 1.050
Target Final Gravity (FG) — 1.011
Target Alcohol by Volume (ABV) — 5.0%
Target International Bittering Units (IBU) — 47
Batch Size – 20 litres

INGREDIENTS

2.7kg Pale Malt
1.6kg Wheat Malt

30g Nugget hops at the beginning of the boil

1 packet of Nottingham Danstar Ale Yeast

8 lemons
8 passion fruit
10 limes
10 Tangerines

425ml French’s Mustard (2 standard size bottles)

31.2L water total (11.2L for mash, 20L for sparge)

METHOD

Mash Duration — 1 Hour
Mash Liquor Volume — 11.2L
Total Grist Weight — 4.3 Kg
Liquor to Grist Ratio — 2.6 L/Kg
Mash Temperature — 68ºC
Sparge Liquor Volume — 20 litres
Sparge Liquor Temperature — 75ºC
Boil Duration — 1 Hour
Fermentation Temp — 18ºC

The fruit and mustard are added during secondary fermentation. I diluted the mustard into a litre of water and brought to the boil to sterilise it. Stir thoroughly and then pour the resultant ‘mustard syrup’ into the brew, stir gently as you pour this into the beer as you want to mix it in but too vigorous a stir will oxygenate the beer, which could cause it to develop off-flavours.

For the passion fruit, cut it open and drain the juice into a bowl, discard the rest of the fruit. For the limes, lemons and tangerines thinly peel them (ensuring none of the white pith comes off with the outer peel). Put the peel in a sterilised muslin bag, add some sterilised glass marbles into the bag to weigh it down. Squeeze the peeled fruits and add the fruit juice to the fermenter. Leave in the fermenter for two weeks, then bottle or keg as normal.

The resultant beer? A pleasant citrus wheat beer with maybe a tiny note of mustard heat in the background. Yeah, that may be an anti-climax for you, but honestly, the amount of mustard is so small that it didn’t have much of an impact on the flavour. I should stress that it is a nice beer, it reminds me a lot of Hickey the Rake, a Limonata Pale from Wylam Brewery in Newcastle, but it’s nothing crazy at all. By contrast Vault City brewing in Edinburgh released ‘Pineapple Habanero’ a couple of months back, to no social media hysteria, and that had a much more prominent habanero heat to it.

I’ve not been able to actually try the commercial example as it’d be ridiculously expensive to have a can shipped over to the UK, but Matt has—through his network of black market beery connections—managed to obtain some. So I’ve posted him a bottle of my homebrew so he can compare and contrast for us.

PELLICLE CO-FOUNDER MATTHEW CURTIS’ FINAL VERDICT

No sooner had I seen Oskar Blues announce the release of their French’s Mustard Beer, I knew I had to have it. I am a mustard freak. I spoon dijon onto cheese toasties with reckless abandon, drench pork pies in Colman’s, and when it comes to a hot dog, only the disturbingly day-glo yellow tang of French’s will do.

I’m in a fortunate position. As some folks will already know, my dad, Frank, has lived in Colorado for the past decade and is less than an hours drive from the Tasty Weasel—Oskar Blues’ taproom aside their main brewing facility in the town of Longmont. And so he did drive there to purchase some mustard beer but was immediately disappointed when informed it had sold out in just ten minutes. It would seem my mustard beer dream was over.

Thankfully, we have good contacts. One being Oskar Blues director of brewing Tim Matthews. My dad collaborated with Tim when his former employer released a new variety of malting barley called Genie (now in commercial production) and Tim produced the initial trial batches on the Oskar Blues pilot system. I’ve also met Tim on a few occasions and interviewed him for Good Beer Hunting in September 2016.

““When it comes to a hot dog, only the disturbingly Day-Glo yellow tang of French’s will do.””

A hastily sent text and a while later my Dad stopped by Tim’s place to grab a few cans, some of which eventually found their way into my hands. How did it taste? Well… I really enjoyed it.

The beer itself is a light and easy-drinking wheat beer. On the nose, it’s as though there’s a little dill pickle juice blended with a citrus-forward quaffer. There’s little or no head retention, perhaps due to the acidity of the mustard. To drink it’s light, fruity and—honestly—quite delicious. There’s a little mustard seed and pickle again at the back of the palate, but it’s well balanced, and not particularly out there.

With Paul’s homebrewed version the first major difference was foam, which was plentiful, and stable too. Always a good sign. It also poured a shade darker than the Oskar Blues—amber, as opposed to pale straw. While the nose this time lacked the fresh tang of pickles, there was plenty of citrus, which followed through in the taste. The homebrew was far bolder in flavour, with waves of oily lemon zest followed by a snap of bitter hops that wasn’t detectable in the official beer at all.

There were similarities. A mustard seed character lurked in the background of Paul’s beer, with the citrus note being similar in tone, if more pronounced in his homebrew. You could definitely tell that one was the clone of the other. I will be honest and admit I slightly preferred the Oskar Blues beer, which was more balanced, and more obviously tasted like French’s Mustard (quite remarkably, unsurprisingly) which, I guess, is the point.

The most disappointing thing is that so little of the beer was actually made. I hope it gets a re-brew so that more folks get to try it, and more budding homebrewers can try replicating it as Paul did. It was a real highlight to drink some of his homebrew again, he’s a real talent, and I look forward to drinking my remaining bottle of his mustard beer under less-critical circumstances.

With thanks to Tim Matthews at Oskar Blues for providing Pellicle with some beer to make this feature possible.