Bananas Foster Beer -WAY Better Than it Should Be!

What if Bananas Foster was a craft beer? 🍌🔥
That’s exactly what we set out to find out! In this episode, we take one of the most iconic desserts—bananas, brown sugar, caramel, and just a hint of rum—and see if we can turn it into something you can actually brew and pour into a glass.
Will it be a rich, sweet masterpiece or a sticky, banana-scented disaster? Either way, we’re diving spoon-first into this wild dessert-beer experiment.
Join us as we mash, ferment, and taste-test our way through this Bananas Foster-inspired brew—and find out whether dessert beers really can work at home.

Ingredients:
1lb (0.453 kg) Golden Light Dry Malt Extract: https://amzn.to/3WTtuCx
128 fluid oz (3.785 liters) Warm Water
1/2 packet SafAle S-04: https://amzn.to/456TNsn
OG 1.034

Additions:
8 oz (226.79 grams) Brown Sugar
2 lbs (0.9 kg) Frozen Sliced Bananas
2 Large Sticks of Cinnamon
1/2 oz (14.17 grams) Tettnang Hops: https://amzn.to/4qswTFQ
Back Sweeten with Brown Sugar (we went to a Specific Gravity reading of 1.034)
1.5 teaspoon Banana Extract: https://amzn.to/47u1b2z

Related Videos:
Beer: https://youtu.be/IS-tJ3AuWN8?si=QnKLnhAbMyffS4BC
Oxygen: https://youtu.be/G4EScWFw1TQ?si=Ei6AIbAn4ckFMtzB
Extracts: https://youtu.be/H1c1Zd-K-yE?si=NkH50tnu02CMGz9s
Ginger Beer: https://youtu.be/wbNKWkm65ro?si=8UbZZnEeA0xqAli7
Pasteurization: https://youtu.be/zWBU3EI-EFo?si=K6nYFuRgLRcqWltF
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Star San: https://amzn.to/3SXFoKg
TRBOS: https://amzn.to/3WROzxD
2 Gallon Brew Bucket: https://amzn.to/3KuIeBA
Our Favorite Pitcher: https://amzn.to/4dFWNzh
Spaddle: https://amzn.to/4bM43IQ
Graduated Cylinder: https://amzn.to/4dW26dD
Hydrometer: https://amzn.to/3x8zsWY
Baster: https://amzn.to/3DXs2c8
HOSS: https://amzn.to/48qUH6C
Rumble Jar: https://amzn.to/4owOwCH
Auto Siphon: https://amzn.to/4cz8VRr
Beer Taster Glass: https://amzn.to/3XYHV9w
Mini Keg: https://amzn.to/3Otdx1G
Co2 Cartridges: https://amzn.to/4g4Iyol
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Today we’re making bananas foster put in a beer. So this is going to be a super easy recipe. We’re actually going to be using an extract for this. And this is just CBW Golden Light DME. It’s dry malt extract. Why am I using dry malt extract? And cuz it’s easy, right? You can use liquid malt extract if you want. The problem for us is usually they come in enough to make five gallons at a time. We’re only making one gallon. I’m just going to open it up. Pour it in. This is a 5 L bucket. Yeah, this stuff. It literally has a warning on it for children that it gets stuck in their nose. I’ll read it just a second. Missed some. Make sure you get all of your extract out of the bag. It’s your extract. You paid for it. I think we’re good. Warning. Keep away from small children and apparently. The thin film may cling to nose and mouth and prevent breathing. This bag is not Oh, they’re warning about the bag, not the It’s a bag. I’d warn about the extract cuz that stuff is dangerous. I have 128 O of warm water. We’re just going to pour it in. Now we mix. For that, I’m going to use the spattle. It’s a spoon. It’s a paddle. It’s both. Get yours in the description below. We will have all the volumes, all the ingredients, all the tools, everything you need to know, plus any additional videos that we mention in this video linked in the description below for your convenience. Speaking of volumes, that was one pound of dry malt extract. By the way, if you use more, you are going to make a higher alcohol content, but you also have a higher chance of a stall and throwing off the balance of flavors based off of the way we’re doing it. We get asked that a lot. How can I make a higher alcohol? Well, this is supposed to be beer. It’s not supposed to be 27,000% alcohol. You know, you’re supposed to have a couple, two, three of them, not really feel too much. Now, this particular beer is going to be flavor forward. So hopefully the ABV is low enough that you can have one, two, or three as hopefully you will want them. So right now this smells as if I had just boiled this for an hour. We have spent all of 3 minutes making this so far. 2 minutes and 40 seconds according to the timer on my camera. And this is why I love extracts. Now if you wanted to do a whole grain or an all grain or a broom bag, you totally can. Um we do not have preparations for that right now. Probably just enough to get like a 1.030 to 1.0. 040 starting gravity, which is what we’re going to check next, and then go from there. And then the recipe is basically the same. And I’m mixing this through thoroughly just to make sure that there’s no like balls of, you know, extract in there or anything like that, but it melts pretty quick, especially in warm water like that. Some people like to use hot water. You totally can. I just used warm from our tap, which is filtered water. Take our reading, 1.034, 034 which if I look at that from this perspective I take the 1.034 034 and I rotate that around to the potential alcohol, it gives me almost 5%. So like 4 and a half% or so alcohol, perfectly fine for a beer. I don’t have any issue with that whatsoever. It’ll also ferment very quickly and that’s an a huge advantage in making beer and cider over meat and wine is that it’ll ferment even faster, but it’s not going to ferment at all unless we put something in there to ferment it. Now, what are we using today to do that, Brian? Safel SO4. A lot of people think it’s safe, but you know, we went to visit Fermentus over in Belgium and we found out that it’s actually Safel S4 because the company’s name is Lasaf. Yeah, Lasaf. So, it it makes it makes perfect sense when you get it explained that way, but at first you’re like, safe ale makes sense, right? Okay. This is a little over half a packet. And this is SO4. This is an ale yeast. It’s best to use ale yeasts when you’re making beer. And here’s why. There are maltodextrins which is a type of sugar in the malt itself that only alle yeasts are actually bred to break down. Regular wine yeast and meat yeast actually can’t break them down. So best to use an ali yeast when you’re making beers. Does that mean you cannot make beer with wine yeast? No, absolutely. Because we’ve done it, but it just might not be the best option. We like SO4 because it’s really good to like 10 to 11, sometimes even 12% ABV. Um, it’s a strong fermenttor. We did a test recently where we used an expired packet of it that I think was the problem. That’s why we don’t know. It’s still working. It’s going really slow. Yeah. But we added new yeast. And from here, I can see it going. It’s bubbling like crazy. Okay. You know what I need? You need I need the hos. The hammer of superior ceiling. It’s just a dead blow hammer, but it’s so much fun. We’ll have a link to this too. They come in different colors. I got red. Surprise, surprise. Someone told me about the that though for hammering them down. And it actually seems to work really, really well. Do we have an ear lock for that? I do. I just don’t have it prepped yet. So, if you want to put your label on there, I will fetch you on I got to finish writing up my label. So, you know what? while I finish writing up the label and while she gets the air lock ready, we’re just going to let you know that this is going to ferment and we’ll see you in a week or two when it’s ready. Okay, so it’s been 1 week. Let’s open this lid and take a look. We had a little um incident with this one. Yeah, let me let me tell you a little story. We may have mentioned it in this video. If not, we’ve certainly mentioned it in other videos that part of our fermenting beverage storage is on top of our standup freezer. And so because it’s a freezer, it has a nice thick door. Well, that thick door makes it difficult to realize just how far back you need to put your your fermentation vessel. So, I may not have um placed it on the It was so well on the door. I open the door. It comes crashing down shockingly. And I don’t know how because I’m not a dexterious person. I caught it. Yep. And the only thing that spilled is a little bit out of the airlock. A little bit out of the air lock. That’s it. Unbelievable. But that’s a testament to how good the lid stays on. Maybe not the seal itself, but the lid stayed on. Let’s take a look inside this, though. As I like to do when we open up a bucket that I can’t easily see inside. I just want to take a quick optical inspection. I’m not seeing anything in here that makes me worry. There’s no eyeballs, no teeth, or anything like that. It smells like beer. Unhopped beer. And that’s what it is at this point. It’s literally an unhopped beer. But let’s take a reading on it and see if it’s actually done. All right. Being that this started at 1.034 and it’s been a week, I’m going to say it’s probably done. But you don’t really know until you take this reading. And that’s part of why we do these things. It’s starting to clear a bit. Still got some bubbles in there. But remember, this is just step one. There’s other things coming. And beers, malts, I should say, tend to have some amount of non-fermentable sugars. Now, there’s ways to get more out of it if you really want to. I don’t really like to add stuff that does that cuz to me, if it’s a non- fermentable sugar, that means it’s not supposed to be fermented, and it should add to the flavor and complexity and body of a brew. Now, this one went to 1.00.6, which is pretty typical for most beers. So, 1.006. Take a note on that. And what do you think? Should we move forward? I think we should move forward. All right. Part of the reason why I think we need to move forward is because this wouldn’t be Bananas Fosters’s beer without bananas. And we have brewed with bananas. It’s a super weird process, but it comes out fantastic. Now, something interesting about this one is we did start at 1.034. So, let me let me just do a little bit of math for you using the calculator teacher said I would never have handy. It was right here. 1.034 starting gravity minus 1.6 006 final gravity is 28 points or 028 gravity used times 131.25 gives us 3.675. So this is like 3 12% ABV which makes me really happy because I intend this to taste super yummy when we’re done with it. And so a lower ABV means I get to drink more. However, we’re now going to be adding things that have sugars. Yep. There is a possibility that they could ferment. Yep. We won’t really know until afterwards. And here’s the thing, we always expect that to happen. So, we can adjust things later on. All right. The first thing that we want to add is brown sugar. And this happens to be dark brown sugar, which as we all know, I hope you know, brown sugar is really just white sugar with some molasses added to it. How much do we want to use? Let’s do half a pound, cuz we can always add more, but it’s very difficult to remove it once it’s in there. Exactly. We’re pretty sure this is going to end up getting pasteurized and keg carbed at some point. So, yeah, half pound is probably a safe amount. Here we go. Hopefully, I won’t splash too much. Don’t forget there might be nuculation sites. Yeah. You have to be careful with brown sugar cuz it tends to clump really easily. Mhm. And comes out in big blobs. Like this. Like that. Get out. Who would have thought it’d be this hard to just get brown sugar out of a bag? Me. One more shake. There we go. There we go. And it went to 8.1. Oh well. 8.1 oz of brown sugar. It doesn’t It doesn’t matter. Now, I know some of you are screaming at your TV, cell phone, iPad, or computer right now because you’re going to oxidize it. The chances of that are pretty slim. I know people always say that beer is easier to ruin this way. That may be true. We’ve never had that as an issue. And I’m mixing very, very carefully. Granulated sugar, like brown sugar, tends to melt into things pretty easy, so I don’t have to go too crazy. All right. I don’t hear any more scraping. I don’t either. I think we’re done mixing. I’m going to leave that in there, though, cuz the other things I might want to mix them around. But I’m going to take another reading because this way we can tell you where it is and we can Yeah, approximately. And find out what it does, if it’s going to do anything more. it. If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too, because it should be sweet. Uh, looks like 1.030 right now. I’m going to carefully pour this back in. And now we have our brown sugar. I like cinnamon. So, I’m going to take two of these big boy cinnamon sticks. Break them in half. Drop them right in. You can use more if you want. You can use less if you don’t like cinnamon. And then wouldn’t be bananas foster without bananas. So we got one lb and one lb frozen sliced bananas. Now you could use fresh if you really want to. However, I highly suggest doing this. If you grab Oh, did you smell that? If you get fresh, slice them up and freeze them. Smell that. Oh, that smells so good already. Oh my god. I mean, just that’s the aroma I want the beer to have. Yeah. That’s why we’re using two lbs of bananas. Now, they may ferment some. Okay. And that’s okay because we’ve we’ve made banana brews before and as weird as it was, it tasted amazing. And I know lots of you are saying, “But you didn’t take the sugars from the bananas into account when you did your gravity reading.” Well, that’s because a cup of this only has 14 gram of sugar. We actually have Yeah. 14 grams. There’s three servings. So, six servings altogether. So, 666 84 g of sugar per bag, right? No, total. Oh, total. Total. While you put that in there, I’ll actually tell you how much this can possibly add to our total here. So 84 gram divided by 454 which is how many grams are in a pound is.18 * 0.046 for you know that’s how many gravity points in a pound of sugar in a gallon. Um this could amount to 8 gravity points which is 1.1 ABV. If all the sugars in the bananas fermented out it could add 1% to the ABV. Now, the amount that we did for the uh brown sugar, that could be a couple points. That could be a couple percentage points, but it’s okay. Now, we didn’t thaw our bananas. We just got them straight out of the freezer. We know on purpose that frozen bananas or frozen anything, the temperature is going to decrease of your brew and therefore fermentation process is going to slow down. We don’t care. Maybe we can stunt it. Yeah, you know, who knows? It’s all good. But is this going to be a sweet beer? Yes. But are we done yet? No. I just have to throw these away. And my hands are getting sticky. The observant among you might have noticed this little bowl with green things sitting in it over on the side. And you also might have noticed that we didn’t put any hops in this when we fermented it the first time. It’s because I don’t really want this to be like a bitter beer. I don’t want like a high IPA kind of. They should be a dessert beer. Yeah. So, what we have is some Tetnang hops. And we chose those because they tend to um do like fruity aromomas, florally, and a little bit of spice, which we thought would pair perfectly with our bananas foster concept. They smell nice. They do. I I actually like tanang hops a lot. I have a half ounce here and we’re dry hopping. So, this won’t really be a bittering. It’s more just to help balance the flavors a little bit so that it’s not just sweet on top of sweet on top of sweet. Now, sometimes when we dry hop, we put our hops in a a vessel so that it doesn’t add to the goopiness. We got bananas in here. It’s going to be goopy. Yeah. Let me Let me just show you. If we don’t have goop and stuff in the bottom of this when we’re done here, we’re we’ve done something seriously wrong. I think there’s just going to be a ton of goop. And it’s okay. Kind of kind of push try to submerge them a little pops down in there. I’m not really stirring so much as just trying to get them Mhm. get in there. I got to admit, this doesn’t look very appetizing right now. Banana stuff is always weird. And honestly, I would rather deal with frozen bananas than raw bananas fresh cuz I remember doing the squishing and uh it was it was less than fun. All right, so we have a couple of things to consider now. We’ve added a fruit ingredient, which typically we like fruit ingredients to stay in there for 2 to 3 weeks, but we also have a a bittering ingredient with the hops. We can probably go two weeks now. We got to get the lid back on cuz if it doesn’t snap, your seal’s crap. Yeah. Not that the seal is the most important thing. Time for the hos. The hammer of sup superior ceiling. I keep getting it confused if it’s supreme or superior. I don’t think it matters. But anyway, just a lot more fun than pressing with your hands. All right, got all our notes. Two weeks. See you then. All right, so this has been sitting on the fruit now for about 2 weeks. So, it’s time to take a look at it. Make sure that it’s not growing anything that it shouldn’t be growing. It’s going to be messy. Oh god. Ew. That’s the hops. Yeah, I was like, what is that? Yeah, you need to see this. Okay. So, what you’re seeing is bananas, cinnamon sticks, and remnants of hops. But I don’t see any mold. I don’t see anything that looks wrong here. So, we’re good. Oh my god, though. Do you smell that? That smells really good. That’s amazing. Yeah. Okay. All right. So, this is a mess. It’s a super mess. So, I would like to rack through. Yeah. I’m not even putting this in turbos. Yeah, I would like to rack through um the um rumble jar. Rumble jar. Yeah. Okay. So, we’re going to rack to our pitcher because we might actually sweeten this one. I know you don’t normally do that with beer, but we might. And this is bananas faster. It’s supposed to be sweet. And when I say I’m going to rack through the rumble jar, I mean this um there’s a hop spider, too, that you can use. Um very fine mesh filter is what we’re talking about. And that way I can just kind of Oh god, this is just wrong. Um, put that in there gentle. Gently. Yeah. And then grab the auto siphon. When you work with bananas, you know, it’s just kind of gross. And I have the auto siphon with the cap on it still. And I’m just going to get that started. Nice color though. Really nice color. Um, the idea is it keeps all the heavy lees, the big stuff out and lets the liquid come through without clogging up the the works, clogging up the auto siphon. I’m starting to really appreciate the the rumble jar for that. Like I think today we if you didn’t know, we we do several pieces of videos in one day. I think today alone we’ve used it for three different rackings just today. So it it it’s so worth having one. It doesn’t smell overly hoppy. It’s got a little a little hops coming through, but not bad. I smell the banana, though. Yeah. The banana and the malt. It’s actually really nice combo. Yeah. And there’s the molasses. We already add brown added brown sugar in there. So, there was some brown sugar in the fermentation. What a combo. Cinnamon, too. That’s coming through a lot, too. Oh, I I’m excited now. I think this is going to be really good. I’m so glad it smells so delightful because it looks disgusting. That looked gross. And we like to show you those because, you know, a lot of people might look at that and go, “Oh, that went bad.” And they dump it out before they even ask. Don’t do that. That’s just what fermented bananas look like. Yep. They’re gross. The thing that startled me was the green, but then I realized, oh, hops is extra goopy. Yeah. So, we’re just going to taste this as is. You probably see I have a bag of brown sugar sitting right next to me anyway. Yeah. Typically, we let beers just do their thing and ride, but this is this is different. This is a whole new world. Now, we did actually add brown sugar to this uh before along with the bananas and stuff like that. So, this, you know, we didn’t take a reading after we did all that. This might might have fermented a bit more. Do we want to take a reading? Might as well. How is it? It’s hoppy. Oh, is it hoppy? It’s It’s got a a strong citrus note. That’s the tetang hops. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it fermented every last bit of that brown sugar cuz it’s sitting at 1.002 now. So, we’re probably going to want a back sweetness. I feel like the hops are getting in the way of the banana flavor. Yeah, it doesn’t taste like it smells, which makes me sad. Okay, what would you like to do? I get the banana flavor. I believe in our Oh, banana extract realm of extracts, we have banana, but it also needs to be sweeter. Banana. Yes. All right. So, typically I would prefer to use fruit to get our flavors, but since we’re at this point, so close. So close, we’re going to go ahead and use banana flavor extract. Now, this is from Olive Nation, so I know it is an equality extract. We actually did a test on various extracts and some of the banana ones in particular come off very artificial and so I’m hoping well even this one might be hoping it won’t be it’s the the older style of banana. Yeah. But I’m okay with that because we do still have some real banana in here. So I don’t think it’s as much of a problem. Just says for culinary use only. It doesn’t even doesn’t even tell you since we haven’t poured any yet. Yep. And we know we want to sweeten it. And sometimes sweetening alone can bring those fruity notes out. Do we want to do that first? That’s what I was saying before. Yeah. Okay. So, I’m going to sweeten with brown sugar. Could use white sugar, could use honey, could use brown sugar, could use molasses, could use whatever you want. Typically, bananas foster has brown sugar in it. So, that’s why we’re going to use brown sugar. I got to hope I don’t splash too much. Now, this sugar is for flavor. This is not for carbonation. That part’s going to come later, and we’ll show you how we’re going to work around that. Yeah, we’re actually going to keg this. We’re not going to naturally carbonate because we can’t anymore. We just added a fermentable sugar. So, that would ferment if we tried. Well, we could. It’s just a very complicated, tricky, and potentially dangerous. Yeah. So, we don’t like to do it. You are right, though. It is possible, and we have done it. We did it in a ginger beer years ago. I don’t recommend it. It It can be dangerous. Keg carving is so easy. The kegs cost about $100 or so, maybe a little bit less. They hold a gallon. We’re going to pasteurize right in the keg and then carbonate it. It’s super easy to do. If you didn’t want to sweeten this and you weren’t worried about that kind of thing, you could naturally carbonate this. Just put it into bottles, use a little bit of insurance yeast is my recommendation. Add 42 gram of carbonating sugar per gallon and you’re good to go. We have exactly a gallon here today, so that actually works out well. But I want it sweet. Notice the small pour. I’m not sure that we’re there yet for sweetness. Nope. I’m kind of sad now. Yeah, we had high hopes. This smelled like perfect and now I’m just like, we’ll get there. We’ll get it there. I will give you a reading at the end so that you know what we got it to. And don’t get discouraged because this is part of the process. You’re always learning and you’re always adjusting. And I think adding the brown sugar is going to bring back a lot of those molassesy rich flavors. And then the extract, two different kinds of banana flavor actually is kind of a nice way to go. Anytime you can get multiple sources of the same thing. And I know someone’s going to say that we could have crushed those bananas or squeezed them or something. We’d also be squeezing the hops. So, I didn’t want more of that. We are already It’s hoppy hop forward. Yep. Which is part of why we stopped it after 2 weeks. Normally, I’d go 3 weeks on fruit, but the hops could have put the hops in a rumble jar, kept them separate, pulled them out after a week. Yeah, that might have been a better option. Yeah, you know, hindsight 2020 every time. I think you’re just chasing a a brown sugar blob around. I can see. Oh, I wasn’t really paying attention. You see this little black thing? I was like, ah. [Music] We’re on the path to redemption. Okay, let’s start using some extract now. Okay, I have a half teaspoon measure here. And they don’t really give any indication how much to use. So, I’m going to add a half teaspoon. Take a taste and see. That’ll give us a gauge. This is the one from Whoops. Okay, it’s a little more than a half teaspoon. This is the one from Olive Nation. I think we might have said that. We can Oh, I can smell it already. Yep. Uh, we can put a link to those, right? They came from Amazon, I think. Half teaspoon might be enough. I mean, it should be banana forward. Should be banana then brown sugar. Foster. Mhm. They don’t call it Foster bananas. [Music] It did punch it a little on the flavor. Yeah, we need another half teaspoon. I think we’re going to need more sugar, too. Okay. Well, let’s do this. So, this will be a full teaspoon. And I’ll just add more sugar. Do it all in one shot. We already know we’re going to want it. Well, we’ve added enough brown sugar. We have now changed the color. [Music] It’s definitely closer. Oh, wow. That’s getting really close. I think we need a little bit more of both. Okay. It’s definitely coming around though. Like the extract is really pulling a lot. I think personally if we were to try to do this with actual bananas, we would need like five pounds of bananas to to get that much flavor. The hopping is really what tilted it over you did. We over hopped. Yeah, some people may may like it that way. We are not a hoppy people. I’m appreciating hops more now than I ever did, but I still this one I always wondered the balance of hops to banana and sweetness is going to be the issue. Probably could have left the hops out. It smells like banana now. Yeah, I think smells like banana beer. I think that was good. And with the carbonation, I think the carbonation potentially going to give it a little creaminess. I think that’ll be nice. That is really nice. Now, what’s happening is you have a little bit of the tang from the hops, like a little just a touch, but it’s bringing the sweetness level back down to Yeah. to normal cuz there’s there’s a lot of sugar in here now. Before it was hops forward. Now it’s more balanced and you get more of the banana brown sugar. The banana brown sugar. Mhm. Yeah, definitely. That’s what I’m tasting now. But you have that malty uh hoppy thing in the background of it, which is cool. So, it’s definitely bananas foster beer. I’m going to guess this is 1.022. I would be wrong. You would be wrong. I didn’t think about it real hard, but 1.0 034. So that shows you how much hops can have an effect. Yeah, we are now sitting on a time bomb if we do not do something about it because this will start reermenting. Okay, so what we’re going to do is rack it into a keg and pasteurize it in the keg. When we do it in the keg, much simpler. I put it in a in a pot, put the keg into a pot filled with water with my Anova suvid and I heat it to 160° internal temperature for 1 minute. Let it come back to room temperature and we will be back to show you how to carbonate in the cake. Okay, so we are pasteurized. We’re brought back to room temperature and we’re ready to carbonate. Now, I do something a little bit different with my kegs. I have a center post here that I’ll just show you. I put this on after pasteurization, not during. I left that open during pasteurization to let the pressure out. And I just open this up after a couple hours and let the pressure out. But this center post is wonderful because it adds the uh the caps like you would use for a regular keg. Are you smelling it? I’m smelling it. Smells It smells like banana beer. Yeah. Okay. So, that’s why I like these. It does cost a little bit extra, but it gives you a lot of versatility. Let me show you as soon as I get this back on. That noise that you may have been hearing that’s really annoying is actually the weight of the end of our tube. So that way it keeps the tube down at the bottom when you are ready to cake pour or whatever. Tap, distribute, distribute, serve, whatever. Yeah, those words. So some things neat about the center post is it has two connections and it has a pressure release valve. Um when we made the cider in a keg, a lot of people freaked out. They thought that we didn’t have any way to um release excess pressure. Absolutely we did. We never removed that. That was always there. Um, but anyway, this is our pressure regulator and the way to connect it. And see, I can just go like that and it connects on. You have to just make sure that snaps. Yeah, I’m not connecting it for for real yet. I can go on either one. That way, once I carbonate this, I can actually remove all that and take it with me somewhere. I can use these on other kegs. Really, really wonderful way to do it. This is just the connector. It has a valve and a uh pressure gauge. So, I have here our CO2 tank. Make sure the pressure is decreased, otherwise known as off. Yeah. And then use the threads, twist it on. You’ll hear a little puff sometimes. Yeah. You don’t want to be slow. You want to You want to make sure you’re lined correctly, and then just go for it. Now, because I know this is going to go into our mini fridge, I’m going to put this on the side because it makes it a little bit lower. If I put it up here, it’s too high. So, I’m just going to pop that on there. Okay. Okay, so we got it on. Now I want to increase the pressure a little bit. Should hear some gas go in sometimes or at least see pressure go up. The pressure is going up. I want to purge a little bit just to let out any air that might have been in there and then crank it all the way up. And I just let it fly. I I put it to high. Right now it’s just about hitting the red zone, which is like 45 PSI. that will go down over time. It’s just a thing. Don’t worry about it. And then I shake it up a little bit. A lot. Okay. Then ideally, you want this to have been cold. We didn’t refrigerate this first cuz we always seem to forget to do that. Yep. But this is going to go into a mini fridge and stay cold. And in 3 to 5 days, it should be fully carbonated. We’ll be back in almost a week to show you how this tastes and see if it actually works. All right. So, last time we made the adjustments to it and then we carbonated it. So, today I am going to serve it. We’re going to taste this, which means I got to put this guy on here. Now, the way we do it is I just give this a shake every couple of days. I didn’t really do it all that much this time. Maybe two or three times. It’s still showing something in the range of like 12 to 13 PSI of pressure. So, I want to reduce that a little bit for a serving. I have a feeling though that CO2 tank is done. Yep, it’s done. So, just going to remove it. This is how it always works. We usually need one CO2 tank to uh carbonate it and then one to serve. Now, it’s fully pressurized again. And I can open this up a little bit to get to about, you know, between 5 and 10 PSI for serving. Yep, somewhere in there. Perfect. to serve properly. Everybody tells me you just got to go for it. And they’re not wrong because that usually works best. These taps are not like a partial onoff kind of thing. It’s just go for it. The first pour is usually mostly foam. But here we go. Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you sure? Here we go. Uh, we got some sediment in that one. And I need more pouring pressure. Hope you don’t mind sediment. I’ll take it. There’s some chunks in there. That was weird. All right. Now, I did mention that my concern of our tube with the weight being at the very bottom that we might have wanted to multiple rack it to have a clear beverage. And I think our pore is showing that. It’s hard to do though. Yeah, it is hard to do. Um, and part of that, I think, was the cinnamon that we added because we broke it up. Yeah. And we might have wanted to filter it better when we wrapped it. Yeah. The banana itself. But this this looks like cinnamon. So, okay. It’ll be fine. It’s not clear. It’s got a little haze, which, you know, it’s okay. I I don’t hate that. Decent carbonation, though. My head is retaining. Your head’s bigger than my head. Mine the pressure time I poured mine. I’m still getting used to using the kegs for this purpose, so just, you know, bear with me. I’m getting the banana on the aroma. It smells like banana. That’s making me happy. Smells very much like banana. That’s pretty cool. So, so far so good. I’d like it to be a little bit clearer than that, but I’m okay. I’m okay with it. Are you ready? [Music] Oh my gosh. Wow. Oh my gosh. That is so good. It’s like I get so excited. It’s like a dessert beer. That’s This is Oh wow. I mean, we did sweeten this quite a bit and we added the extracts and all that, but man, it’s got the flavors of Banana Foster. This is fun. I was afraid the hops was going to be too powerful. I think we overpowered the hops with a little sweetness. The hops is still there. I’m still getting hops, but we we were able to tone it down with some sweetness. There have been Well, when we tasted initially, it was very very hoppy. Yeah. But with the carbonation and the adjustments we did Yeah. This is Banana Fosters’s beer. This is And I think I was right when I said that by adding the extract and the real bananas, we might get a nice complexity. Yeah, you did. Cuz it’s it’s got that real banana fake banana thing mixed together. Yeah. You know, like banana pudding. Yeah. Like if you’re making It’s kind of got that and the cinnamon is coming through really nicely. That but the brown sugar back note. Oh, this is really awesome. This is This is one of the better specialty beers we’ve made, if not the be. No, no, not the not the best. It’s It’s up there, though. You’re getting the maltiness of the of the the grains coming through, but it’s not like overpowering. It feels more like a almost a slight crust like on a pie or something. Yeah. Um so it’s like bananas foster pie beer. It mind-blowing how many flavors are coming through because you get that and the hops and then you get the sweetness of the brown sugar and then you’re getting like the sweetness of the banana and then you you get Yep. A little bit of cinnamon, a hint of the the um like candy banana. It’s like cinnamon toast crunch with sliced bananas. That’s not a bad description actually. Although it’s more like sliced bananas with cinnamon toast crunch. I’m Cuz this is banana forward. This is banana forward. Yeah. Yeah, the two kinds of banana, they hit your palette at different times. The the real banana, the actual banana flavor comes forward in the beginning, but the the candy banana flavor comes through through at the end. Yeah. And because you get the banana up front, it that combined with the carbonation is giving me kind of a creamy sensation. Yeah. Which is delightful. I’m really impressed. Even with all the junk in the bottom of my glass. Wow. Which is just pieces of cinnamon. I think you’re right. Yeah. And that could be fixed with uh the ball that floats in there. And there’s a couple ways to do it. On these, it’s a little harder because the neck is very narrow. I haven’t really figured that part out yet. It’s never been that big of a problem for us. Even though I got the extra chunky glass, I am not getting any sensation of particulates in the mouth. So, it’s just a visual thing. I think the particulates are so tiny. It’s from when I snapped the cinnamon. Yeah. Yeah. little tiny pieces. That’s all it is. I mean, I I never finished the bottom of almost any glass of anything that I drank. So, I do. At this point, you should be seeing our scoring system on the screen. It goes 1 through 11 because that’s right, ours goes to 11. But what you don’t see on there is the super secret zero for things that just absolutely suck. Spoilers, this is not a zero. I I can’t make a judgment on the other the other end because I’m guessing for both of us when I guess that way. Um, wow. This is This is tough though. Do you have a number? Mhm. One, two, three, 9.5. The only reason why this is an 11 is because of the cinnamon gunk. The only reason why this isn’t a 10 or an 11 for me is the flavor is really, really good. But I wish we didn’t have to use the fake banana. That’s the That’s what’s holding me back. I would go 11 on this if it was all from real banana. If it was all real banana and no junk, there was no junk and it was clearer. This would be like a 12. It’s really that good. It’s kind of kind of shocking. Fantastic. And it’s it’s fun. I know I’ve used the word fun before in other beverages, but when something is unexpected yet delightful, what other word can you use other than fun? I agree. Okay, hopefully you got something out of this video. And as always guys, thanks so much for watching and have a great day.