Sweet But Stupid

It might be good for you, but we hate the taste of glycyrrhizin. In high school, we used to taste it at night, right before bed, brushing with the lights out. It’s a natural derivative of licorice root, found in the light purple-y tubes of Tom’s of Maine brand toothpaste mom started buying. We knew it as “Fennel death flavored” cuz it’s kind of horrible. Think stiff, chemically enhanced potpourri in your grandmother’s shitter.
We only bring it up because we had a bad flashback to this natural toothpaste while drinking beer. These things shouldn’t go together, right?
The beer in question, Alagash Fluxus, is cool and clean looking. It’s label looks like it’s printed on linen — an off-white pant suit to be more exact — and it’s decorated with hand-drawn flowers. Fluxus is latin, of course, for “flow” or “continuous change,” which the label points out helpfully like a Scientific botany field guide to California flowers. Or like a tube of yuppie toothpaste might. Or a swiftly dropped reference in a bossanova pop song about personal growth.
Theoretically, this name makes sense because it’s a seasonal recipe that Allagash’s brewers play with each time they brew it. This year’s Fluxus sounded compelling and wholesome, it’s brewed with sweet potato and black pepper. Not a bad flavor for a sweetly Belgian-via-East Coast saison-style brew. We started wishing we’d had it around Thanksgiving.
But we got bad vibes right off the bat.
The head just wouldn’t quit when we first popped this bottle, which you can see looking closely at our beers in the foie gras video. Thick creamy foam on top of more bubbles. The hue and texture was perfect, buxom, completely gorgeous. But off camera we marveled at the pure cane rum kick of this weird, chemically brew. Sometimes we think beers fall into upper and downer categories. This was definitely an upper — a ‘run-tell-them-on-the-mountain’ type of sativa drunk. We got giddy lapping up this blinding, sweet amber sap. Halfway through one of us realized what taste was tripping us up: the tooth paste. Sweet but root-like, the peppery plant taste nearly hidden behind big golden bangs of saccharine.
Cute and strong, this beer had appealing qualities; it just didn’t speak our language.

Dairy Pairy: Delice Des Cremiers, a soft, bloomy triple creme
Soundtrack: Vampire Weekend’s “California English”