My club made a German chocolate cake beer one time.
It was a dumper. The frosting and oils did indeed ruin the beer I think.
Experimentation is fine, to a point. But I think a cake or pie or donut inspired beer might typically taste better than adding actual cakes, pies, donuts, etc. Twinkies, anyone?? Ick.
that’s my thought. but the ramen beer is great and the pie beer is pretty good too. that’s why i’m curious. both those beers claim to use the ingredients in the mash.
Instant ramen noodles are flash fried and I’d worry about the fat, but fresh (real) ramen are just flour, water, and alkaline salts (calcium hydroxide usually.) (So why not just use flour and avoid accounting for the water content in your mash bill?) I’ve heard of a lot of homebrewers using breakfast cereals for the flavors. Read the label to see if there’s anything detrimental in there. But on the whole, I’d agree with Dave. Use flavorings that are suggestive of other foods. The pumpkin spice model.
that’s kinda the sentiment i’m leaning on. It’d be cool to have that “brewed with a whole cake” thing but i’m not ever willing to sacrifice flavor for a gimmik
Or how about just figuring out what beer pairs nicely with cake? (I know a guy who was thinking, beer and hot dogs go together, I’m gonna put hot dogs in my boil. He finally thought better of it.)
I made some “bad idea” beers early on. I may have inadvertently started the peanut butter and jelly trend… thankfully a dozen years later the Northern Brewer forum is gone, along with all of the evidence.
My take is currently that anything with preservatives, oil/fat, artificial flavors, and other complex ingredients does not belong in a beer. It might be fun to say you fermented it, but you can absolutely get better results using base ingredients without everything else mixed in, and it will cost a lot less. If you must, buy deyhdrated peanut butter powder and an artifical grape flavoring and add that… in no case should you add whole reeses peanut butter cups and purple skittles.
There is this brewery where I live that has done Oreos and peanut butter sandwiches in beer. But. They also make 100 beers a year and throw whatever’s they can into beers. Kinda strange but it’s interesting.
I feel like if I was going for a pie beer, the various ones intended in this post, I would try to get grains that fit the character of pie crust. And maybe just throw pecans ground up in the fermentation, or what ever kind of pie I was going for. Not too extreme.
And now after writing this post. There is another brewery where I live that makes a pie hole porter, you can actually get the recipe to their alt beer on the app if your search for “deer.”