Sweet and spicy. That’s the taste combination you can expect if you’ve chosen the right beer for your crawfish boil. The sweet comes from the crisp, sweet beer that you’ve chosen to dampen the fire on your lips and on your tongue.
And the spice? That comes from the Cajun spices that turn ordinary crawdads into lagniappe, that little something extra that makes the memory of the boil linger long after the burn of the spice dies down.
Some social commentators have likened the crawfish boil to the barbecue. But the crawfish boil might be something more if we can say so ourselves. A crawfish boil, like a good conversation, starts out slow and builds until batch by batch the crawfish are done.
And batch by batch, the conversation has become as delicious as the crustacean that once filled the shells that now lie strewn about on yesterday’s newspapers.
That’s the joie de vivre right there. Sweet and spicy, indeed.
Get Your Craft Brew On…
While we understand that your beer preferences for a crawfish boil are as individual as you are, we’d like to humbly offer our suggestions for your feast. Each of the beers we’ve chosen taste delish and complement boiled crawfish beautifully, adding just the right amount of sweet to the crawfish’s spice.
Abita’s Strawberry Lager
We thought about putting this beauty at the end of the list. You know, save the best for last and all. But we decided against it, given that this light lager is the most popular lager every year during crawfish season.
What’s not to love about it? True enough, it a lager that’s brewed with wheat malt and pilsner, which would make it similar to many other beers. But then, oh but then, there’s that bit of strawberry juice added in.
This addition turns up the sweet, making this crisp, refreshing beer the best way to calm the spice of the boil without cutting out the taste all together.
The Black Lotus
If the name of this beer doesn’t get your Zen on, we know the taste will. Imagine a beer infused with apple and caramel and malt flavors and scents. It’s a bit darker than some of the beers we’d choose for a good crawfish boil, but it definitely has the requisite sweet required to put out the crawfish-induced fire in your mouth any day of the week.
NOLA 7th Street Wheat
Quick! What do you get when you add a bit of sweet lemon basil flavoring to a top-of-the-line light wheat beer? If you guessed, the NOLA 7th Street Wheat, then you’d be right.
This beer is hard to beat. In fact, it didn’t used to be the year-round beer that it has become. Originally, it was a seasonal beer, once served only when the summer heat was at its hottest. But its popularity turned it into a year-round treat, whether it was hot out or not.
And speaking of hot, be sure to have a few pints of this on hand as your boil heats up. The sweet wheat will cut the burn and the lemon and basil flavorings will bring out the succulent flavors of the crawfish meat as few other things can!
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
