If you ask me, I much prefer beer tasting over wine. Maybe I’m just not classy or sophisticated enough to taste the difference in wine, or maybe I like soda so I prefer the carbonation in beer. The fact of the matter is, you don’t need to age beer for more than a decade for it to taste great in a large variety of flavors. And with this Randall Jr. Beer Infuser kit from beer maker Dogfish Head, you can customize your own beer with in just 10 minutes.
Most traditional home brewing kit are large, bulky, and requires a couple of hours or days to let the beer ferment. After the beer is ready, there’s also the bottling process which can get annoying when all you want to do is dive into your creation. With the Randall Jr., all you have to do is throw in the hops and whatever flavors you want to try out and add your favorite beer. The tumbler design lets you hold all the ingredients in one portable bottle and shake it all together before refrigerating for 10 minutes. When it’s ready, the top helps you strain out 16 ounces of liquid from the ingredients and you’ve got freshly infused beer that’s custom made for your taste buds.
The Randall Jr. makes it easy for home brewers to experiment because of its simple instruction. You can use whole ingredients and dump it all in like a stock pot. Testing out new flavors is easier than ever, from chocolate beans to fruits to flowers to all the spices in your kitchen cabinet. Best of all, the tumbler only costs $20.
However, for the price point, you should also expect some disadvantages to a larger, more thorough home brewing kit. Since you can’t make your beer from scratch, you will need a beer base that can handle and compliment whatever flavors you’re looking to infuse. The 16-ounce bottle is also only available for you to test out small batches at a time, so if you found a flavor you really like, you will have to repeat the process multiple times to get a good supply for the future. Lastly, since it’s kept in a resealable bottle, we anticipate the carbonation to run out pretty quick with repeated opening and closing. Beer isn’t something you want to keep inside water bottles; it’s better off fresh out of a glass bottle or the tap fountain.
Still, given its cheap retail value, the Randall Jr. is an inexpensive way to experiment with beer before possibly moving on to making a large batch from scratch. If you’re a home brewer with a great recipe, feel free to share with us your favorite combination of flavors. And please remember to drink responsibly!
