A broad catchall for beers brewed with vegetables and other non-fruit garden produce — the base beer can be essentially any style, with the vegetable contributing flavor, aroma, or fermentable sugar. Coconut and nuts fall in this category, while chili peppers and pumpkin/squash are split out into their own categories. Typical examples range from coconut porters and sweet-potato ales to corn, beet, carrot, and tomato beers. The vegetable character should be in harmony with the base beer rather than muted by hop bitterness.
In the glass
Origin
Brewing with whatever was at hand is older than the commercial beer industry, and vegetables — like fruit and other garden produce — were folded into beer both as a source of fermentable sugar and for the character they brought. Corn and other starchy crops have a long history as brewing adjuncts in the Americas, and squash-based brewing dates to the colonial era. The modern category took shape as craft brewers reached beyond fruit and spice for novel ingredients: coconut layered into porters and stouts, sweet potato and carrot into autumn ales, even savory additions like tomato or beet into saisons and sours. The result is a deliberately wide family defined less by any one recipe than by the presence of identifiable vegetable character.
Notes
The category line worth remembering is which produce counts as a “vegetable” here. Coconut is treated as a vegetable, so a coconut porter or coconut stout is a field beer rather than a fruit beer. Nuts also land here, since they contribute far more flavor than fermentable sugar. Two neighbors are deliberately carved out: beers built on chili peppers are their own category no matter what else is in them, and beers built on pumpkin or winter squash split into pumpkin/squash and pumpkin-spice categories of their own. Maui Brewing’s coconut porter is a widely cited example of how well a vegetable can ride a dark, malty base.
Defining examples
Maui Brewing Coconut Hiwa Porter (formerly CoCoNut Porter)·Cigar City Guayabera-style vegetable ales·Tomato or beet-based saisons (various craft)·Carrot-cake and sweet-potato seasonal ales (various craft)·Various craft coconut, corn, and squash beers