Have you heard about the upcoming new release from wine estate Chateau Margaux? After its usual period of aging in French oak, they moved some of their legendary Premier Grand Cru into once-used American bourbon casks, where it rested for a further six months on a combination of vanilla beans, cocoa nibs, and hand-roasted kopi luwak coffee. Just before bottling, it was then infused with a smoothly blended mash of peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, in a sly nod to Elvis Presley (who supposedly loved them). It will be released this coming March at the Chateau only, and it is said that Robert Parker’s people are already camped out on the streets of Bordeaux to make sure they get some.

Replace the wine in this fictional story with a famous brand of Scotch whiskey, daiginjo sake, or cognac and it would sound just as ludicrous. Make it a beer, however, and the lines would immediately begin forming. I have come to think it a bit strange that wine, sake, and whiskey lovers are satisfied with products made only from grapes, rice, and malt, respectively, and yet beer geeks can’t be satisfied until every new animal, vegetable, or mineral finds its way into our favorite beverage. Why the big difference? Why are there pastry stouts and milkshake IPAs but no milkshake junmai or pastry merlot? Is it that wine and sake are classy drinks that can stand on their own, while beer is a pretender that can never be so dignified?

I had three weeks in Germany this summer to ponder this question over a few dozen liters of kellerbier and pilsner, before coming back to the craft beer world of Japan, where I found more American- and Swedish-influenced milkshake IPAs and pastry stouts than ever before. Malt, hops, water and yeast. Do people still think they can make beer from only four ingredients? Why ever did God give us peanut butter and bacon sandwiches if He didn’t mean for us to put them in our beer?

Craft beer has always been about innovation. It started in the US as a revolt against the boring yellow lagers that dominated the market and came in two flavors: regular and lite. After mastering ales in the British mode, craft brewers felt the need to differentiate themselves, and this led to higher abvs, new varieties of hops, aging in barrels, experimentation with yeast and bacteria, and then to oh so many additives: from fruit and spice, to pumpkins of course, then meats, lactose and vanilla beans. It has been a wild ride. And, without a doubt, many of these new free-style beers are quite tasty. I just need to stop and ask: “Where is this all going, and whatever happened to plain old beer?”

I know many brewers as well as beer drinkers who were initially put off by hazy, New England-style IPAs. I get the point. It’s really hard to make a crystal clear beer, and brewers spend years learning how to do it. Now it’s suddenly cool to have your beer look all mucky. But New England IPAs were, after all, simply a new kind of hop-driven IPA. They just used wheat or oats for smoothness and a yeast that stayed in suspension. Similar things have been done for centuries.

Then Omnipollo and Tired Hands came along and decided to do us one better, by adding lactose to pump up the sweetness, vanilla beans, well, because they liked vanilla, and whatever extract was on hand, and voila!: the milkshake IPA was born. We’re not sure if this happened because they simply could not make a hazy IPA as well as Alchemist or Tree House, or if it was because they really wanted to drink this stuff.

And we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I remember my first. It was Tired Hands’ Today Will Be A Good Day. The brewery description: India Pale Latte(!!!) brewed with spelt, oats, and lactose sugar. Hopped intensely with Amarillo, Simcoe, Centennial and Mosaic. Conditioned atop coffee and Madagascar vanilla beans.

Despite my initial doubts and a hearty giggle, this was really good. Sweet and creamy, with lovely citrus and tropical fruit from the hops blending with the vanilla and coffee. It didn’t really taste like any beer I knew, but it sure was delicious. It wasn’t the world’s first milkshake IPA, but it was an early version of a style that would soon go crazy. Now we can find them using nearly every conceivable fruit or spice, all including lactose, and most with vanilla as well.

I don’t know which stout first crossed the threshold of the pastry shop. Three Floyds Dark Lord was certainly one of the precursors. Since 2002 it has been brewed with “coffee, Mexican vanilla, and Indian sugar.” It also happens to be the beer that popularized the limited release with its long lines. Dark Lord always seemed just like a big, strong stout, however. There was no marshmallow or coconut involved and it wasn’t even barrel aged. It was burnt and bitter and not just sweet and spicy. It tasted like beer, very different to things like Omnipollos’s Noa Pecan Mud Cake imperial stout, or Mikkeller Beer Geek Vanilla Maple Shake. (How about Tired Hands’ Only Void Double Strawberry Milkshake Imperial Stout IPA (whew!))?

What makes a stout into a pastry stout seems to be not only the number of additives, but the amount of focus given to them. While some brewers use coffee, vanilla, or chocolate to add nuance to their stouts, pastry stouts by definition reject nuance in favor of impact. Additives become the main ingredients.

New and original beers are fun and interesting and definitely help drive the craft beer market. What bothers me is when people say that this increase in non-traditional additives is inevitable, that craft beer must always evolve, that in this business, brewers who can’t turn out something unique week after week are going to be left behind. And that pilsners are boring.

I have always advanced the idea that additive-rich beers are fine as long as they still “taste like beer.” In light of these new trends, however, this has come to seem far too relative. What tastes like beer to me is likely quite different from what does to you, especially if your introduction to craft beer was via milkshake IPAs. I suppose this is largely a generational issue. I am old enough to remember the days before craft beer, and I came to love beer through German lagers, British bitters, and Belgian Trappist ales, not juicy lactose milkshakes. I really can’t blame younger beer drinkers for having had their minds and palates blown by extremeness and not being interested in the simple styles, and yet, does it really taste like beer? Can you still taste the malt, hops, and yeast character? In many milkshake and pastry beers, I simply can’t. Not in any meaningful way, anyhow. And furthermore, I find that I’m already quite bored with many of these sugary concoctions.

So I have decided to take a break from “beer” that has peanut butter, marshmallows, or blueberry muffins in it, although I am not against coffee, fruit, or spices as such. Lactose is ok if it’s in a low-gravity milk stout, but I prefer to avoid it in IPAs. Lastly, I will still try a sip of yours, and I won’t criticize or mock you if you like such beers, as long as you don’t tell me that pilsners are boring.

All Beer Styles articles are written by Mark Meli, author of Craft Beer in Japan.

This article was published in Japan Beer Times # () and is among the limited content available online. Order your copy through our online shop or download the digital version from the iTunes store to access the full contents of this issue.