When planning some of the first recipes at Dallas’s Vector Brewing, head of brewing Tomás Gutierrez looked to beer’s origins.
The earliest beers made thousands of years ago were a kind of porridge or beer soup made from cereal grains. So, in collaboration with nearby Intrinsic Brewing, Gutierrez started designing soup-inspired beers. There was a tom kha hazy IPA, based on the Thai coconut soup. There was a Mexican pozole-inspired smoked beer, with a full hog’s head in the boil.
But the one that has stuck around and become a crowd favorite started with one of Gutierrez’s favorite comfort foods: pho.
“All the spices and aromatics in that really play well,” Gutierrez says. “The first one we did was just lemongrass, basil, and Thai chili.”
But the key ingredient that keeps his spiced Pho Sho lager clean and crisp is also an ancient one: rice.
And like Gutierrez, craft brewers across the country are tapping the grain for their latest creations, finding inspiration in global and local flavors, and drinkers are unsurprisingly on board.
Can rice go craft?
Rice beer has roots in civilization’s earliest fermented beverages, and is a key part of some of the world’s top-selling beer brands. (Bud Light proudly touts rice as one of its four ingredients.) But despite — and in part because of — its mass-market appeal, rice has largely been overlooked by the craft beer industry.
“There definitely is a stigma around using those adjuncts like rice or using corn,” says Shawn Oberle,
