That stuff which looks like 4 pounds of yayo is actually corn sugar, and the brown stuff in the syringe isn't going in my arm, its actually "Hopshot", a hop extract product that you can supposedly used as either an early or late boil hop addition. People talk about Vinnie at Russian River using hop extract as if its something dirty. Its the same exact hop compounds extracted from hops. The reason he uses it doesn't even have to do with flavor, it has to do with the fact that he uses so much hops that he loses a lot of beer that gets soaked up in spent hops, so using hop extract reduces wasted beer.
As for the corn sugar, this was suggested by Vinnie himself in a recipe he gave out for a Pliny the Elder clone a few years ago at a homebrewers conference. He also indicated to to use more corn sugar for a Pliny the Younger clone. I should also mention that this doesn't necessarily mean Vinnie uses corn sugar in Pliny himself, but it looks like he does. But wait, isn't corn sugar another one of those dirty ingredients that the big brewers used to make beer into the bland, characterless fizz that beer geeks bitch about constantly? Yes. However, if you want to brew a high gravity beer that is still very dry, you can't go all malt. Well, not unless you want to spend 3 years learning how to malt beer at low temperatures in fermenters like Sam Adams and Weihenstaphaner just did in their Infinium collaboration. And they patented the process anyway.
Beers like Duvel, Pliny the Younger, and Hopslam are all high in abv, but dangerously drinkable despite their incredibly high abv. Part of this is because they are so dry, which could only be accomplished with some type of adjunct. While Pliny (probably) uses corn sugar, Hopslam gets some of its gravity from honey, which is incredibly fermentable. People hear that Hopslam is brewed with honey and think that it is a sweet beer. Adding honey will actually make a beer drier unless it is pasteurized before it ferments out. Many dry, high alcohol Belgian beers are brewed with Belgian candi sugar, which is made from a mixture of beets, bears, and Battlestar Galactica. Or just the first one.
So yes, there are times where a certain effect could only be achieved through some type of adjunct. And if you don't want any of the flavors from candi sugar or honey in the beer, corn sugar is an acceptable way to do it. And hop extract is basically just a more convenient way to get the great characteristics that hops give to beer, and its still from hops. If you still have any concerns about either, I suggest you try Hopatitis C when its ready in a couple months. Should be pretty solid after it is dry hopped with Citra, Centennial, and Colombus 3 different times in secondary.
