anyone try to flavor beer with lifesavers?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

jangelj

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 7, 2010
Messages
222
Reaction score
4
Location
jax, fl
let me start by saying that I hate fruit in beer. It just is not my thing. Now, SWMBO is a different story. She had a cherry beer (she thinks it was a lambic) that was very cherry flavored. I thought I'd try to brew her a strawberry beer.
I made a basic pale ale and planned on racking 2.5 gallons on a couple pounds of strawberries and see what I get. Then I remembered, she described the beer she had as "like drinking a beer with a cherry lifesaver in your mouth".

So, that got me thinking, has anyone tried (or would there be a problem with) adding lifesaver(s) to a batch? My thought is to bottle some of this beer (I usually keg) with different flavor lifesavers and see what I get. The lifesavers I bought are sugar free, so I thought I'd put a little priming sugar and a different flavor lifesaver to each bottle.

What do you think? Has anyone tried to flavor beer in any way like this, or is there a problem with this experiement?
 
Did she have a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat? My SWMBO loves that stuff, I think it's way too fruity.

I've got no gripe with the Budweisers and Heinekens that people sometimes bash on around here, but that stuff is _nasty_. But I bet you're right. It tastes "like drinking a beer with a cherry lifesaver in your mouth". :drunk:
 
Chris Colby has done some strange, strange things to the beer. This page has some examples, including the Jolly Rancher one. I'm not sure which beer sounds worse, the one made with a case of Mountain Dew or the one made with 10oz of raw oysters.
 
MalFet said:
Chris Colby has done some strange, strange things to the beer. This page has some examples, including the Jolly Rancher one. I'm not sure which beer sounds worse, the one made with a case of Mountain Dew or the one made with 10oz of raw oysters.

Oysters for sure
 
I made a strawberry 2.5 gal batch once. Extract at the time, used a basic PA recipe like you said and split light DME and Wheat DME. Racked on top of 4 lbs of fresh strawberrys that i diced up for one week. Great strawberry aroma as soon as you cracked open the bottle. I don't like the fruit beers, but got rave reveiws from family members that are not "beer drinkers". The strawberry taste wasn't over the top, but you could definatly taste it.
 
Did she have a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat? My SWMBO loves that stuff, I think it's way too fruity.

I don't think it was the SA cherry wheat. If I remember correctly, I asked her if that was it and she said no. Not sure what it was.
but I'm with most of you, I don't like sweet beers.

Since I've got this beer done fermenting, I'll stick with my original plan of racking onto strawberrys. I will try a couple of bottles with lifesavers just to try it. I'll report back in a month or so about those.
 
If you ever want to get the taste of acetaldehyde for an off-flavor class, just dump a green apple Jolly Rancher in. Perfect.
 
McGarnigle said:
Yummm, Oyster Stouts. Harpoon released a commercial one a few years back and it was really good. An acquired taste I guess. Very mineral-y tasting.

It must be. Yuck
 
I don't think it was the SA cherry wheat. If I remember correctly, I asked her if that was it and she said no. Not sure what it was.
but I'm with most of you, I don't like sweet beers.

Since I've got this beer done fermenting, I'll stick with my original plan of racking onto strawberrys. I will try a couple of bottles with lifesavers just to try it. I'll report back in a month or so about those.

Founders makes one called Cerise that might fit the description. I was suprised when I drank it at how much it tasted like cherry juice. Founders does a cool thing for homebrewers (at least that's all I can imagine its for) they print the IBUs on the neck of the bottle. Cerise was only 15, so not too hoppy. I'd imagine thatd help it appeal to nonbeer drinkers too.

I like the lifesavers idea, might be interesting. That's the kind of stuff that makes homebrewing fun.:mug:
 
I bet what she tasted was a lambic. I have had several cherry lambics that had a really nice tart cherry taste.
 
well, the 2.5 gallons beer on 2# strawberry came out awful. You could taste strawberry in it, but without any sweetness, it was tart and just bad. I tried to dryhop on top of it to make it more drinkable, but that hasn't helped.

But, i did bottle a 16 oz bottle with 2 cherry lifesavers. It came out good! the cherry was pretty subtle, SWMBO suggested doubling the lifesavers next time. I just smashed them with a hammer and dropped them in when I bottled. They completely dissolved. She thought it was pretty good!

I also have 1 bottle with another lifesaver flavor (watermelon maybe?) that she'll try in the next couple of days.
 
well, the 2.5 gallons beer on 2# strawberry came out awful. You could taste strawberry in it, but without any sweetness, it was tart and just bad. I tried to dryhop on top of it to make it more drinkable, but that hasn't helped.

But, i did bottle a 16 oz bottle with 2 cherry lifesavers. It came out good! the cherry was pretty subtle, SWMBO suggested doubling the lifesavers next time. I just smashed them with a hammer and dropped them in when I bottled. They completely dissolved. She thought it was pretty good!

I also have 1 bottle with another lifesaver flavor (watermelon maybe?) that she'll try in the next couple of days.

Yeah, that's the trouble with fruit beers. The vast majority of the taste that we associate with fruit is actually just the sugar. Take that away to feed the yeast and fruit doesn't really taste that good. There are of course ways to make nice strawberry beers, but it involves some creativity usually.

Glad to hear the lifesavers worked!
 
So when you used the life savers did you just use them in place of priming sugar or did you use sugar too?

No, I used priming sugar, too. The lifesavers I used were sugar free (that's all they had at the store when I bought them). If you use regulare (sugar) life savers, I'd think 4 of them would be plenty of sugar to carb and flavor. Who knows?
 
Hmm.... That is interesting. I wonder if the fact that they were sugar free, is why it worked so well? The sweetness came from an artificial source, and wasn't fermented, allowing some sweetness to come through in the flavor. Very interesting.
 
So after much internet surfing, she is 99% sure the beer that she tried that started this whole thing is Lindemans's Cherry Lambic.

Also, we opened the other lifesaver flavored beer last night and it was really good! It was watermelon. Now, I don't like fruity beer, but it was good. She really liked it. Reiterated that next time I should use twice as many lifesavers (so I'd use 4) per 16 oz bottle.

I wonder if using the sugar free lifesavers is the key, so the sweetness doesn't get eaten my yeasties.
 
Sorry to revive this older thread but I was just trying to figure this out. I did some rough calculating and came up with ~2.5 grams of sugar to carb a 12oz bottle (4.5oz of sugar x 28.3gm/1oz = 127.5gm of sugar) based on 4.5oz of priming sugar in a 5 gallon batch.

~53 bottles in a 5 gall. batch
127.5gm divided by 53 equals 2.5gm so ~2.5gm per bottle.

A lifesaver has ~1.26gm of sugar so 2 candies ~ 2.5gm of sugar!

So, 2 lifesaver candies per bottle should equal the same sugar as 4.5oz of priming sugar in a 5 gallon batch!

So if I 1/2 the batch I should be able to melt 53 candies in 2 pints of water, boil then add to beer and get perfectly carbonated and flavored beer!

I think I have way too much time on my hands! LOL
 
Back
Top