Flying Ants

Known as chicatanas, these crunchy leafcutter ants are a delicacy of regional Mexican cooking—and they have a flavor profile that may be oddly compatible with your darker, richer beers.

FIRST OF ALL, BE KIND: Give your vegetarian friends a warning before you decide to pour them some of your ant-beer.

Second, don’t forget to snap a few photos before you toss the ants in the kettle, since surely one of the benefits of brewing with insects would be enjoying that shock value. However, there may be another benefit: Apparently, these particular creepy-crawlies are actually pretty tasty.

Chicatanas is the common name for Atta mexicana, flying leafcutter ants in Mexico, where at certain times of the year the ants are especially fruitful and numerous. Local cooks harvest them, grind them up with spices, and cook them into moles or other sauces. Oaxaca might be the best place to try them, but in this wondrous age of convenience, you can even order chicatanas online—not cheaply, and not all year, but you can find them. (On oaxacanspice.com, for example, three ounces or 85 g will set you back $55.)

Descriptions of the chicatana flavor include earthy, nutty, bitter, and salty—just the thing for a big, rich stout or other dark beer to absorb. That’s the case with Chicatanazzz, a barrel-aged flying-ant stout recently produced by Forager Brewery in Rochester, Minnesota. (For whatever it’s worth, the tiny-batch ant stout is sitting pretty on Untappd with a rating of 4.35/5.)

Forager cofounder and head brewer Austin Jevne says the idea to use the ants originated in the kitchen. “At Forager, we have a great group of chefs,” he says. One of them, Elba Vasquez Pastrana, grew up in Mexico and received a kilo of chicatanas from her mother in May 2020. “She prepared a mole sauce with them to put over pork ribs, which was mind-blowing and delicious. She gave me a few of the raw ants to try, and their flavor was exciting, diverse, complex, and completely unique.”

Here’s how he describes the taste: “Spiced nuts smoked over an open fire, with deep, rich raw cocoa nibs and red-clay earth. Remember the popular