Breakfast in a Can

Some mornings I think about just skipping breakfast and heading straight to beer. The Funky Buddha Brewery in Florida apparently thought the same thing and made a beer with bacon, maple syrup, and coffee in it. 6.4 percent alcohol.

I tried it once. It tastes like exactly what you’d expect—which is to say someone threw three breakfast things at beer and saw what happened. Maple is sweet. Coffee is there. The bacon adds something savory, or maybe that’s just your brain filling in the blank. It works better as a concept than as an actual drink, but that’s the whole point of this kind of beer.

The brewery doesn’t stop there. Their whole line is like this—chocolate, peanut butter, pumpkin. See an ingredient, think it might go in beer, put it in beer. Most of these are gimmicks. But someone has to push those boundaries, and I appreciate that it’s them and not some focus group at a massive brewery.

There’s something genuinely funny about categories that break themselves. Breakfast as beer. Coffee as beer. Bacon as beer. At some point you stop asking if it’s a good idea and just accept it as proof that people will try anything once.