Beer for Chaps Episode 2 from Jennifer Litz on Vimeo.

Estrella Damm Inedit is, supposedly, the world’s first beer specifically designed to be consumed with food. That’s a lofty claim, since people have been drinking beer with food for centuries. But hey, if El Bulli’s Ferran Adria develops a beer that he says will go perfectly with your food, I’m in to at least try it. As you’ll see from our video, we find that Estrella Damm Inedit isn’t really beer at all, but more like a malt beverage that falls in the non-beer category. At least, it tastes that way–the Web site says it’s brewed with barley malt, water, hops, and yeast, so the usual suspects are all there. But I swear I tasted no hops, and I’m not the only one.

*Note: I believe in misspoke in this episode, claiming Ferran Adria to be the man behind the molecular gastronomy movement. He’s probably its most recognizable practitioner alive (though the inventor of food foam doesn’t label his food molecular gastronomy), but Herve This, a chemist, wrote the definitive book on the science of food and helped coin the phrase.