All the Ways Craft Beer Got Weird This Year

We would like to think that everybody here at MUNCHIES has a pretty open mind when it comes to tasting craft beer. Hell, we'll try pretty much anything at least once.

However, even with our appreciation for the truly obscure, we couldn't fathom how brewers came up with some of the crazy brews that we featured this year.

For starters, let's take a (short journey) back in time to the advent of stag semen chocolate stout. We repeat: a beer that is made with the reproductive fluids of deer. We get it: some people are way into that creamy, frothy head on stouts, but this creation took that concept to another level. To each his own, right? According to our interview with the brewer behind the beastly brew, the beer was made as a "social experiment" to see who would actually drink it.

Well, people did drink it, and some even tasted a faint "saltiness" in the beer.

In fact, craft beer got so weird this year that our very own gypsy-brewer-turned-MUNCHIES-columnist Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Evil Twin Brewery, known for his off-the-wall beers, could barely keep up with all of them.

Chilean craft beer brewed with fog? You got it. An Amsterdammer who brewed craft beer out of potatoes and snow? Yessir. And who could forget Brazil's delicious craft beer that is purposely infected with bacteria, or our story on that Norwegian beer brewed with filthy money and frozen pizza?

Of course, enjoying all of these weird beers can't come without some kind of negative repercussions on the human body. We're still sorry that MUNCHIES had to be the bearer of bad news and tell everyone that their IPA addiction could be contributing to male drinkers developing "man boobs." (Don't blame us, blame the high-phytoestrogen content naturally found in hops.)

Thankfully, this moobage hasn't yet afflicted all men, and has spared legendary WWE wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin. An exclusive interview with him and MUNCHIES this year revealed that his days of chugging macro-brewed beer are long gone, replaced now strictly by IPAs—his own "Broken Skull IPA" that he released with an LA brewery, to be exact.

2015 also proved to be the ultimate beer year because tech and craft beer finally joined forces. We're talking in part about the genius app a Swiss-Italian chemist and ardent beer-lover conceived that uses your DNA to help you choose which beer to drink.

Take that, human evolution. And beer evolution, too.