Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head’s founder and chief ideas-man (check this New Yorker profile for the rest of the story) apparently isn’t satisfied with exotic-wood-aged beers or ancient recipes beers. According to the NYT, he’s after the big banana: saliva-fermented beers. Well, partially saliva-fermented, anyway. Central American custom has one chew corn, spit it into a container, let said corn/spit ferment, and then: enjoy! Witness the true salesman in action:

“You need to convert the starches in the corn into fermentable sugars,” the always entertaining Mr. Calagione said by phone from his headquarters in Rehoboth Beach. “One way is through the malting process. But another way — there are natural enzymes in human saliva and by chewing on corn, whether they understood the science of it, ancient brewers through trial and error learned that the natural enzymes in saliva would convert the starch in corn into sugar, so it would ferment. It may sound a little unsavory. …”

And, of course, Dogfish Head is a reasonably large operation. Even a pilot batch for them requires a lot of, uh, chewing:

“We’re going to have an archaeologist and historians and brewers sitting around and chewing 20 pounds of this purple Peruvian corn,” he said. “You kind of chew it in your mouth with your saliva, then push with your tongue to the front of your teeth so that you make these small cakes out of it, then lay them on flat pans and let them sit for 12 hours in the sun or room temperature. That’s when the enzymes are doing their work of converting the starches in that purple corn.”

[…]

“It’s dismal, I’m not going to lie to you,” Mr. Calagione said. “I’d say everybody is deeply, unpleasantly surprised at how labor intensive and palate fatiguing this stuff has turned out to be.”

The article details the whole chewy denouement. Any homebrewers out there can likely use this important tidbit:

“It’s better if you drink water,” Mr. Calagione said. “I take a drink of water before every time I do it. It’s not as pummeling on my gag reflex.”

Noted.

They churned out a few kegs of this stuff and found some folks familiar with the traditional product to test it out for them:

This is not chicha,” Angel Marin (Ecuador) and two others said, almost simultaneously.

“It tastes like beer,” said Yanko Valdes (Chile).

“It’s supposed to be sweeter,” said Martin Estel (Peru). “It’s not bad though.”

Asked about the chewing and spitting method, Mr. Marin said that it was “old school — in the jungle.”

He also made a suggestion: “You want chicha, you should go to Queens,