Have you infused a beer with liquor before either to blend with the flavour (port infused stout as an example)? Have you had a good example of this? Do you think brewers should be doing this at all? If this is something you have done before how did you go about doing it? What varieties of spirits have you tried? Were they home made infused liquors or commerical products?
It's a pretty simple answer for me, I haven't done much. It's not that I am a purist it just hasn't interested me much thus far. I only have used a distilled spirits in a beer and it was some vodka I used to hydrate cocoa powder for a chocolate stout.
The joy of homebrewing is the experimentation side of things. You can try things that aren't necessarily commercially viable because your batch size is a lot smaller. While I don't have any interest in it plenty of people bring such beers into the homebrew shop. If I have noticed any problem with such beers it is they overpower the base beer. Just like a good holiday-seasonal beer I think balance so that you can enjoy the base beer is the key.
Recently a commercial brewery locally started to play with bourbon casks. One of the first I tried was a cask aged American Pale ale, sadly this beer was completely overpowered by the bourbon. It was like drinking a glass of bourbon straight without the burn. So finding the base beer that can stand up to the liquor is definitely a key element to success in the process.
So if you are interested in liquor in beer, give it a try, but take it easy and maintain the balance.
