Six years ago, I wrote a story about mixing beer. Not beer cocktails or beer with lemonade or soda. Two perfectly good beers, pouring them into the same glass and seeing whether they could become something that neither brewery actually made.
The idea started during a conversation at Schlafly’s Cabin Fever festival. I learned that one of the brewery’s imperial pumpkin beers had essentially begun with a combination of Pumpkin Stout and Oatmeal Stout. That sent me home wondering what else might work. Peanut butter stout and vanilla stout? Sure. Raspberry pale ale and chocolate stout? Why not? IPA and stout to create something resembling a Cascadian dark ale?
I called the story “The Art of Mixing Beers” and moved on—except readers didn’t. Six years later, it remains one of the most consistently read stories I’ve written. People continue finding it, even though many of the specific beers I used have long since disappeared…