DRAFT Magazine

By Tim Cigelske

I’ll admit I was skeptical when I first heard of Miracle Fruit. I believe my exact phrasing was “What kind of voodoo shit is this?”

“It’s for real,” declared my friend Kyle, who had experienced the exotic effects firsthand.

Miracle Fruit, I learned, is a tablet that dissolves on your tongue and makes sour and bitter tastes seem sweet. If you drink straight-up lemon juice, for example, it tastes like candy. Tabasco sauce becomes like barbecue sauce. And something like orange juice loses its acidic bite and goes down even sweeter.

Almost like magic. But how?

“The truth is, science doesn’t completely know,” explains Think Geek. “It has something to do with the protein miraculin that bonds to your taste buds, but the exact cause is still a mystery.”

The implications for beer are considerable. The taste of stouts, ales, and even lagers would be dramatically altered. But to the best of our knowledge, no one had ever documented a comprehensive beer tasting with Miracle Fruit.

Until now.

Kyle, my brother Mikey, my wife Jess, and I recently gathered the largest variety of beers we could carry. We stocked up on Belgian lambic, double imperial pale ale, doppelbock, wheat beer, double chocolate stout, coffee stout, Japanese sweet stout, oatmeal stout, winter porter, pumpkin lager, pizza beer, Oktoberfest, 18+ percent ABV Dogfish Head Raison D’Extra and, for a control group, Miller Genuine Draft.

Then we hit the Miracle Fruit.

“This is going to be groundbreaking research,” proclaimed Kyle.

The results were immediately astounding.

“It’s like cheating,” Kyle said while downing a Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout. “I don’t even know how to describe how good that tastes. I wish I was more articulate.”

“Like, holy crap!” added Mikey.

“Even my burps taste good!” said Jess, very lady-like.

We then continued to have own minds blown one sample at a time.

The Cheris lambic tasted exactly like liquid sweet tarts. The Lakefront Brewery Pumpkin Lager tasted like pumpkin bars. The Leinenkugel’s Oktoberfest tasted like wine. The pizza beer tasted like pizza Combos. Maybe the biggest miracle of all was it even made Miller Genuine Draft marginally better.

“Everything now is just awesome,” Kyle said.

“It peels away some of the bitterness and highlights the underlying complexities,” Jess offered.

“It doesn’t matter how much Miracle Fruit you eat, this is going to kick your ass regardless.” Mikey said in reference to Dogfish Head’s fermented-raison-and-whiskey aroma.

Flavors that were once hiding, like barely detectable wallflowers, suddenly burst into the spotlight with a live backing band. But it was also more than that.

Strangely enough, one of the words that came to mind while drinking was “purple.” It reminded me of synesthesia, a rare but real neurological condition in which two or more of the senses entwine. Someone affected by this condition can literally taste and feel numbers, colors, days.

Maybe Miracle Fruit taps into some dormant cognitive pathway we already have. If you think about it we’re constantly refining our palate and re-educating ourselves when it comes to taste. We learn to appreciate different beers or the tastes of foreign cultural food. Maybe this just helps speed the process up.

Eventually, though, the effect began to fade after a half hour or so. Yet Cheris still tasted like liquid sweet tarts, double chocolate stout remained really damn good, and Raison D’Extra continued to kick our asses. But not everything faired so well.

“This must be wearing off,” Jess said. “Because that MGD just tasted like cat piss.”

I’m a skeptic no longer.

Tim Cigelske writes DRAFTMag.com’s beer and fitness blog, Beer Runner.