FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Food

Punish Yourself with This Pepper Spray-Flavored Craft Beer

Ever wanted to get drunk off the same ingredients that can disable a would-be attacker? Well, now you can!
Photo via Dogfish Head

Mmm, Mace. It’s not just for defending yourself against creeps in dark alleys. Now, you can drink it, too!

Craft beer brewery Dogfish Head, the company announced in a press release last Thursday, has teamed up with Mace Security International, manufacturers of that misty tear gas, to release a new brew called "In Your Mace!” It's partially brewed with oleoresin capsicum, the active ingredient in Mace's pepper spray—yes, the same one you'd use to debilitate your most sworn enemies.

Advertisement

The beer was available on tap this past weekend at Boston’s Extreme Beer Fest, and it's also on draft at Dogfish's Tasting Room in Milton, Delaware, where they’ll be holding a super limited 750-milliliter bottle release on Saturday, February 17. A small run of 200 bottles will be sold for $18 each while supplies last that day, so you better run fast if you want a potable version of pepper spray!

The beer itself is an 5 percent ABV stout that boasts a “moderately sweet” flavor profile, complete with whiffs of “spicy nutmeg, anise, and espresso aromas with a [palate]-warming chili spiced finish.”

Dogfish and Mace's union may seem, at first glance, rather unlikely. Joke's on you: It turns out that Dogfish’s founder Sam Calagione and Eric Crawford, Vice President of Sales at Mace Security International, Inc., go all the way back to high school, where they were on the same varsity football team.

These two industrious chums, they explain within the press release, were just "reminiscing ‘bout the good old days" of throwing the ole' pigskin around when they decided it'd be a swell idea to make a beer with chicory, coffee, milk, sugar, and two varieties of mace, the first taken from the hull of a nutmeg shell and the other being the same chile oil that's found in Mace's pepper spray.

Calagione has always been something of a trailblazer, characterized by his willingness to infuse his beers with ingredients that some may consider surprising, if not odd, from pork scraps to beet sugar. Neither Dogfish nor Mace Security International responded to immediate request for comment from MUNCHIES on Monday regarding how reception to this particular flavor has been thus far.

“It’s about friendship, flavor, and fun,” Crawford concluded in his statement about the beer. Ah, yes. Friendship, flavor, fun—the three things we think about when we whip out a can of tear gas.