Yeasty Boys with Faye Johnson

Featured Cocktail Ingredient – Beer Syrup

This episode’s featured cocktail ingredient is beer syrup. To make this versatile and surprisingly complex cocktail ingredient, you’ll need:

• Beer! And not just any kind will do. Pick something special. Something flavorful. Something that inspires your mixological mind.
• And then you need Sugar! You could also choose to pick this ingredient carefully!
• And heat!

And that’s about it. 

To make your beer syrup, you’re going to want to do a thing that might be punished harshly in some cultures: let your beer go flat. Crack it. Maybe put some cheesecloth over the opening so no bugs get in there. But let that CO2 vent off so that you’re dealing with the non-carbonated variety of whatever beer you’re using. We’d actually recommend leaving it in the fridge so that you don’t get any weird temperature-related flavor changes.

Once you’ve got your flat beer, you’re going to basically make a simple syrup out of it. But here’s the twist. You can do the usual thing: add equal parts beer and sugar by weight to a saucepan and stir until the sugar dissolves. And this will work. You might get some foaming that you’ll probably want to skim off – and that’s fine. Most bartenders will agree that a rich simple syrup is better than a straight up 50/50. But some recipes out there also recommend that you only sweeten it lightly, and instead achieve your desired syrup consistency by cooking down the product until it evaporates to your textural satisfaction.

Well we’re here to dissuade you from that! In our conversation with Faye this episode, you’re going to learn about some of the amazing things that yeast can do! And if you find a beer that really speaks to you. If that beer noodles its way into a part of your brain that’s connected to your favorite gin, or whiskey, or tequila cocktail, and a lightbulb goes off…why would you want to cook that beer to death!? That would be partially un-doing all the great flavor work that those yeast did while you were watching Netflix. 

So our recommendations for your next beer syrup are twofold:

1. Pick a beer that’s unique and that will yield a syrup that will blow your friends’ minds when they come over for cocktail hour, and
2. Try to have a light touch with the heat so that you don’t end up making yeasty molasses or caramel on your stove.

Of course, when you get your end product, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to use it in a cocktail with your favorite spirits, and that’s where we’d LOVE to hear what kinds of experiments you’re running and how they turn out. So feel free to tag us on Instagram @modernbarcart with your creations, and we’ll give you a shout-out and encourage you on your way.