I’ll miracle your berries…
For those of you not in the know, there are these things in the world called “Miracle Fruit“. They are little red berries that, when eaten, do something very strange to your sense of taste. Essentially what happens is they block your tongues ability to detect sour flavors, and this ability has recently resulted in much hype.
People are now starting to have what are being referred to as “flavor tripping parties”, where everyone at the door gets a berry, and, for the next hour or so while the effects last, they then gorge themselves on food to see how different it now tastes.
The idea sounded very intriguing, and I was curious to give them a try, but sadly the berries themselves are highly perishable and as such rather expensive. Thankfully, a shelf stable version has recently been made available, so I bought a pack of Miracle Berry tablets to give them a try.
Yesterday, the package arrived. I cut up some lemons, limes and grapefruit (foods that are inherently sour are excellent candidates for Miracle Fruit), and in addition had some red wine, brie cheese and Guinness ready to taste as well.
The end result was not as extreme or mind blowing as I’d been led to believe. Lemons taste, well, like lemons. Doused in sugar. Grapefruit tastes like grapefruit. Doused in sugar. Limes taste… well, limes taste fucking disgusting. Almost a chemical or heavy mineral flavor.
The cheese tasted exactly the god damn same.
The red wine was transformed from a cheap bottle of Merlot to a cheap bottle of Sangria in an instant, which I suppose is not all that surprising. What was surprising was the Guinness. What is normally a dark, creamy, lightly bitter beer suddenly became, for lack of a better description, chocolate milk. The reason for this is that, while you might not think it, Guinness is actually a rather sour beer, it’s just that those sour flavors are masked by the rest of the beer. With those sour flavors suddenly masked, the beer’s balance is thrown out of whack, and suddenly the sweeter malt flavors are able to shine through.
All in all, it was an interesting, if slightly disappointing experience. I’ve got about 18 servings left, so I’ll probably throw a flavor tripping party of my own in the next few weeks, for those of you interested in trying it for yourself.