The Miracle Berry

During a tasting recently, a guest told me about a berry that can take anything you eat or drink and change the flavors. She even said that it would remove the taste of alcohol from wine and, well, you know I had to know whether or not it worked.

So I went to Amazon and bought a pack of mberry, a vegan “pill” of sorts that melts on your tongue and claims to introduce entirely new flavors from your favorite things. It took me a few months before I decided to actually try it. Cue me writing this tonight when I decided to take the leap and try it out.

And it’s really weird! It doesn’t so much melt on your tongue as it dissolves slowly (I ended up chewing it).

Here are some of the things I’ve tried:

First, a sour beer. I really like sour beer and this one is a “cranberry sour ale”. I’d already had one without the mberry so I would know what changed. Before the mberry, it tasted like a slightly sour IPA. After the mberry it became ridiculously sweet, losing all alcohol flavors and bitterness and tasting like sour cranberry juice. There’s a hint of bitter on the back palate, but mostly it’s just like juice with no alcohol at all. Talk about dangerous!

Second, garlic salt. Now that I knew what it did to something with a hint of sweetness, I needed to find out what it would do to something with entirely different flavors - salty and savory. I poured the garlic salt onto a plate and, well, licked it off. And it tastes like garlic salt. So, ok, no change there. Wish I hadn’t licked a ton of garlic salt lol.

Third, fresh basil. Yeah, again, didn’t really seem to do anything… until I noticed that the bitterness that usually follows the initial taste of basil was pretty much gone! Wow, that’s really weird.

Last, I decided to try it on a shot of vodka, which to me tastes like pure ethanol.

WOW. It tastes. Like, it actually tastes like it has a taste! A sweet, pleasant taste, with no burn aside from the burn naturally inherent in alcohol. That makes it extremely drinkable. Wow. I’m absolutely stunned (I’m writing this as I try it, which is why my reactions appear to be simultaneous to the writing). Well, that’s worth knowing!

So in conclusion, this stuff actually works! And, though it’s clearly a very dangerous thing to remove the taste of alcohol from alcohol, it’s also INCREDIBLY COOL from the perspective of a person who tastes wine for a living.

Let me know if you do your own experiment and what you decide to taste while using this or a similar product!

Cheers!

Zach