Cheating?

Is brewing with a portion of non-malt sugar somehow cheating? Is it underhand and un-principled to get some of your gravity from malt extract? I don't see why. No more so than getting some of your flavours from chocolate, say, or vanilla. Or coffee. Or coriander, orange peel, melegueta pepper, sage, or any of the number of things brewers use as well as malt and hops.

And hop extracts? Don't get me started. Pellets are cheating? Only whole cones? Who'd say such a thing? That would be ridiculous.

If you find that you're putting in so much of [whatever] that the beer's spoiled, why then, you've put in too much. Including malt. Otherwise, you go for it.

Today, we're not going for that. Today it's all-malt and a load of whole hops. But we keep our options open.