Duke's New Beer Collab Is Designed To Pair Perfectly With Mayo

In collaboration with the Champion Brewing Company, Duke's Mayonnaise has created a beer to pair with their mayo. As far as such products go, this one makes sense. People love a beer that heightens the taste of their favorite foods — as WebstaurantStore points out, there are beers that pair with burgers, salads, and spicy foods. So, having a beer that brings out the best in mayonnaise simply continues along these lines.

Food & Wine report that the beer, which is called Family Recipe, is a Vienna-style lager with Vienna malt and Magnum and Saaz hops. As the publication points out, mayonnaise makes perfect sense to accompany a crisp and bitter beer because "a lager can help cut through any lingering fattiness on the tongue." Instead of trying to replicate the distinctive mayo flavor with the beer itself, the Vienna-style lager is meant to enhance the experience with a bit of sweetness, much like the bread on which you spread mayo. Family Recipe has a 5.1% ABV.

Family Recipe beer will be available at Champion-related retailers throughout North Carolina and Virginia. It will make its debut on August 20 at the Champion Tap Room in Charlottesville, Virginia, but is everyone prepared for a mayonnaise-paired lager?

Mayo-inspired beer may not be for everyone

The audience for the new Family Recipe beer will almost be as small as that for a marmite paired beer. Both polarize, separating the few who like good-tasting spreads from those who dislike mayonnaise and marmite.

But why, some may wonder, do people have such a visceral reaction to mayo? When HuffPost decided to look into the question, they received an equally visceral answer. "I suppose people are disgusted with mayo because it has the consistency of pus," William Ian Miller, professor of law at the University of Michigan and author of "The Anatomy of Disgust," offered. "Some things are more likely to generate disgust than others, and bodily fluids and rot are two of those things." That in addition to the texture, a neutral temperature, and its general jiggles provoke feelings of queasiness in a large amount of Americans. But for those who do not experience this, Family Recipe — and the mayo-filled BLTs that supposedly pair so well with it — may deepen an already strong devotion that some have for the condiment.