It’s not unusual for me to replace meals with dessert. In my diet, vegetables as a whole are substituted with chocolate, and cookies are their own separate food group.

So when I went to the grocery store in search of chocolate cake and found Shock Top Chocolate Wheat to accompany it, I was delighted — and a little wary.

For starters, I’ve been skeptical of Shock Top ever since I found out it’s brewed by Anheuser-Busch. But they try to play it very cool, and you’ll never find anything on the label that indicates that a giant beer conglomerate had anything to do with brewing it.

Shock Top is not craft beer, however, and it doesn’t make you cool and unique when you drink it. You’re not a beer aficionado because you had a Raspberry Wheat once — aka an alcoholic juice box — and you liked it.

And on top of all that, we’re talking about chocolate wheat here. I didn’t even know such a beer chimera existed in the first place, better yet that it could be generally palatable and mainstream enough to be brewed by Shock Top.

Basically, there were all these odds stacked against it, so I just had to try it.

And then it turned out to be really weird.

At first, it tasted like a poor man’s chocolate stout, as if Shock Top just didn’t have the capabilities to brew a stout, so they said, “Screw it, let’s just dump a bunch of cocoa beans into our vats of Belgian White and call it a day.” It tasted very much like wheat and very much like chocolate at the same time, but also very artificial and over processed, like a Hostess cupcake.

Quite honestly, it instantly gave me a stomachache, but that may also have been a result of the chocolate cake I was concurrently taking to the face, or because I’m starting to suspect I have minor wheat intolerance.

Another thing I found odd about the Chocolate Wheat is that it’s sold in a half-and-half six-pack along with three Belgian Whites. The pack encourages you to mix the two beers for some kind of magically delicious outcome. But to me, that just seemed like a wannabe Black and Tan. The Chocolate Wheat seems to be having some identity issues, so someone really needs to break the news that it is simply not a stout.

So what to do with the rest of these beers? I guess I’ll drink them, although they’re definitely not delicious, and that’s coming from someone who’s willing to consume anything chocolaty. I’m probably not going to mix the Wheat and the White because why do I need to overdose on gluten for the sake of these subpar brews?

In the end, I’ll probably just decide Thanksgiving Break is an excuse to empty my fridge of all leftover alcohol and spend the night before I leave drinking the Chocolate Wheats and all of the other reject beers.

But please, don’t make me do it alone.

Published on November 20, 2013 at 9:38 pm

Contact Avery: avhartma@syr.edu | @averyhartmans