The Unique Way To Turn Lucky Charms Cereal Into Beer
Lucky Charms might be a popular breakfast cereal and the subject of a gag in an Austins Powers movie, but did you know that it can also form a base for beer? Problematic stereotypes that connect alcohol and Irish culture aside, there really is a way to convert a General Mills classic cereal into a home brew.
Making your own beer has been a rising phenomenon for decades. According to Stanford Business, the number of breweries in the United States rose from 43 in 1983 to over 1,400 by the middle of 2000. That went from a steady rise to an explosion since the turn of the century, with NPR's count in 2016 standing at more than 5,300 and the majority of those breweries being of the craft or micro variety. To keep within those parameters, craft breweries can't sell over two million gallons of beer in a year, and microbreweries need to keep it under 460,000 gallons annually (per North Slope Chillers).
As North Slope Chillers explains, part of the appeal of craft brewing is the freedom to produce different flavors of beers. It's hard to beat using a breakfast cereal for creativity, for sure. However, it's more than just a novelty idea. It's actually practical.
Oats are oats in any form
Do you know how Lucky Charms cereal pieces get mushy if they sit in milk for too long? Well, that's the whole idea behind this Cereal Milk Stout recipe from Clawhammer Supply. To be clear, you'll probably want to fish the marshmallows out of the Lucky Charms before you try this.
As Clawhammer Supply explains, the cereal pieces in Lucky Charms are made out of oats, and you can use any oat cereal in this concoction. Anything made out of oats is the mash necessary to create your own home brews, as Brew Your Own confirms; thus, don't let the shape of the cereal pieces or the fact that you got them out of a breakfast cereal box fool you. Those pieces contain all the enzymes you need to trigger fermentation.
Clawhammer Supply does warn, however, that the mash made of Lucky Charms cereal pieces emitted an unpleasant odor in the trials. They continue to confirm that the end product had a creamy texture and slight sweetness despite that smell. It might not be one of the world's most famous stouts, Guinness, but there's no luck required to produce it. So if you like your Lucky Charms beer, you might feel like you've found the end of a rainbow.