What is it. You can head over to http://www.hoosierbeergeek.blogspot.com/ and read an interesting article about how four high profile breweries got together recently to create this beast.
In case you don't want to read this article which uses similarities between brewer collaborations and high profile rock band collaborations to illustrate the concept; I have provided a pertinent excerpt from the article below to summarize what they did.
“Three Floyds' 15th Anniversary Beer, Baller Stout, changes that. Brewers from Surly (Darkness), Mikkeller (Beer Geek Brunch), and Struise (Black Albert) brewed their recipes at Floyds, and then combined their beer with Dark Lord to create a new and unprecedented Russian-style imperial stout.”
Last Friday I sat at the bar in the BBC (St Matthews) enjoying a beer (Mohawk Alice). This beer, by the way is a Belgian blonde ale and is one of my favorite of all BBC's offerings. Alas, it is a seasonal brew and in light of their new brewer coming on board from Dog Fish Head, may never be available again. Enough whining.
I noticed the fellow next to me also was drinking a blonde beer and I asked if it was Mohawk. He nodded and said “Half Mohawk and half APA.” I thought ok, he want's to punch up the bitterness a bit. Before I could suggest this he said “Just to get the ABV up.” I was stunned and could think of no reply that would not have been disrespectful. I said nothing else to him.
I understand the concept of mixing beers or other beverages with beer to obtain a different flavor. The mixing of lager and sprite (they call it lemonade) to make a Shandy is commonly done in England. Mix your lager or bitter with cider and you've got a snakebite. The BBC bartender in answer to my query about how long the Mohawk would be available said that I could mix the BBC wheat with the APA to get a flavor profile similar to the Mohawk. There has beer mixing for probably as long as there has been beer. But, is upping the alcohol by volume a common reason to mix one beer with another?
If you want to do that, don't you just mix your beer with a shot? Or better yet just have a shot.
The four high profile brewer's mentioned above did not just collaborate on a single beer. They all brewed their “best” beer and dumped them together. I guess they ended up with a blended beer. The description of this concoction by one reviewer contained so many different flavor notes that I'm skeptical that I would even recognize this beverage as beer. In fact, he called it a beer milkshake. Three of the five reviewers liked this “superbeer.” One said that it wasn't as good as any of the four individual beers. I didn't see comments by the fifth but she marked it 3.0 out of 5 which tied for the low score.
You can mix anything if you want to. But just because you can, does that mean you should?