I Tried It: Beer Gummies

I have fond memories of being a kid and running into the Mr. Bulky's candy store to spend all my hard-earned allowance on gummies of every imaginable type: bears, of course, but also sharks, worms, Peachie-Os, you name it.

Lately I've been seeing gummies popping up made of wine, booze, and now beer. Curious about how to make them, I started researching recipes. As it turns out, beer gummies are super easy and quick to make.

Beer gummies are also relatively inexpensive as the only other ingredients besides beer you need are sugar and gelatin. I bought a pair of gummy bear molds on Amazon for about $7 and found a beer bottle mold from Bakers ToyBox on Etsy for about $12. 

For my beer gummies, I wanted to try both sour and sweet beer styles, so I chose Key Lime Pie Gose from Westbrook Brewing, Wild Sour Series Flanders Red from Destihl Brewing, Limoncello from Deep River Brewing, Kasteel Rouge from Bierkasteel Van Honsebrouck, and Coco Loco Porter from NoDa Brewing. 

The gummies take about 5 minutes to make plus another 5 minutes or so to transfer the mixture into the individual molds. With my first beer, the Key Lime Pie Gose, I just poured the mixture straight from the pot into the molds, which made a mess and also made it hard to get the gummies out once the mixture set. For my subsequent batches, I used the syringe/dropper that came with the molds and it went much quicker. 

I also tried making the Key Lime Pie Gose gummies extra sour by adding a mixture of sugar and citric acid, which is how sour candies are typically coated to make sour. The recipe I used to create the sour mixture called for one cup of sugar and one to three teaspoons of citric acid. Go big or go home, right? Not when it comes to citric acid - I used three teaspoons, which not only made the gummies WAY too sour but also caused the gummies to immediately begin disintegrating. By morning, my bowl of cute and tart beer gummies was a bowlful of liquid:

I was too worried about more disintegrating gummies, so I didn't try the citric acid and sugar on any of my subsequent batches.

The other batches of gummies turned out really delicious and retained a lot of their beer flavor. The Flanders Red was still sour, but not face-meltingly so like the actual beer can be. The Kasteel Rouge gummies were probably my favorite as the cherry flavor really came through as well as the sweet malty character of the beer. The Limoncello was also very good and a good candidate for possibly trying the sugar and citric acid mix again, albeit with less citric acid. 

If you're thinking of making beer gummies, I recommend getting three gummy bear molds rather than two - I had enough gummy mixture left to fill a half dozen cups in my mini muffin tin. I also recommend leaving the gummies in the refrigerator overnight - although I left some batches in for as little as two hours, the batches I left in overnight were much easier to get out of the molds and seemed to have a little more staying power. If you want to retain the alcohol, then make sure to keep the mixture lower than 170 degrees when you're dissolving the sugar and gelatin into the beer.

While the gummies don't necessarily have to stay refrigerated, I recommend keeping them cold as much as possible. I made the mistake of trying to take pictures of them outside and they almost immediately became a sticky mess and started melting, which was not only kind of disturbing and guilt-inducing to see, but also left my fingers (and my phone) covered in sticky gelatin. 

Beer gummies are a super easy, inexpensive, and fun recipe to make for a party or just to delight some friends and co-workers, like I did. It was fun to think through how different beers would turn out as gummies and then tasting them once they had been gummied. 

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Beer Gummies

Ingredients

1 cup beer

1/4 cup sugar

3 tablespoons gelatin (if you buy the Knox gelatine box containing four envelopes, each envelope is exactly one tablespoon)

Directions

1. Pour beer into a saucepan over medium heat.
2. Add the sugar and the gelatin.
3. Stir continuously until the sugar and the gelatin are completely dissolved.
4. Transfer mixture into molds.
5. Refrigerate for at least two hours, but overnight is recommended.
6. Keep gummies refrigerated to avoid disturbing jellification.