Beer Box Truffles. Photo courtesy of Keith Flanagan.

Does your love of beer surpass the constraints of a pint glass? If you are hop-happy and want to switch up your typical booze routine, check out Epicure & Cultureā€™s collection of beer-infused products that can be enjoyed at home. From spa items to bread mixes to candy and recipes, this list has all the best beer and hop-spiked goodies that can be delivered to your door step.

Beauty

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Brew Scootin Boogie Soap. Photo of Music City Suds.

1. Brew Scootinā€™ Boogie Soap

Music City Suds is an artisan bath and body products company from Nashville that built a soap just for beer lovers like you. Brew Scootin’ Boogie is a handcrafted, small batch soap made with beer, hops and pure essential oils. This vegan, earth-friendly product has environmentally-friendly packaging, no artificial colors additives and is void of skin irritating materials. Additionally, their products embrace their Music City home, as soaps come wrapped in reclaimed sheet music. Price: $6 for a 4.5-ounce bar.

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Umstead Spa. Photo courtesy of Umstead Spa.

2. DIY Beer Body Scrub

April is North Carolina beer month, and to celebrate, Raleighā€™s Umstead Restaurant and Spa is sharing one of their favorite recipes for a beer body scrub. They use Mother Earth Brewing Company’s Weeping Willow Wit Beer — but you can customize the recipe with your go-to brew. This scrub softens dry skin, pulls out breakout-causing impurities and shields against harmful UV rays.

Ingredients:

Ā· 5 oz. of Epsom Salt

Ā· 1-2 tbsp. of Olive Oil

Ā· 1 tbsp. of Weeping Willow Wit Beer (or your favorite beer)

Ā· 2-3 drops of Lemon Oil

Ā· 1 Basil Leaf (chopped finely)

Directions:

In a mixing bowl, combine the epsom salt and olive oil. Slowly add in the beer and wait until it settles in the bowl. Mix in remaining ingredients. Prepare a warm shower and gently apply the scrub in circular motions over your legs, exfoliating the skin to a smooth finish. Breathe in the gentle aromas for ultimate relaxation. If you experience breakouts, apply to your shoulders and back to soothe and remove impurities in the skin. After each use, store the remainder in an air tight container and keep refrigerated.

Food

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Lemon Poppy Beer Bread. Photo courtesy of Boardwalk Food Co.

3. Beer Breads

Who said you canā€™t turn beer into bread? Boardwalk Food Company lets you choose from four flavors of delicious beer bread mixes including Original, Rosemary Sea Salt, Lemon Poppy and Cornbread. Then, all you need to do is chose a beer, mix and bake. With microbreweries popping up in more and more places, the possibilities are endless and itā€™s fun to experiment to see how different pilsners, lagers and stouts affect the flavor of the bread. Price: $7.99.

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Ale Cheese. Photo courtesy of The Cheese Guy.

4. Beer Cheese

If you like cheese with your beer, why not try beer in your cheese? The Cheese Guy crafts a delicous Double Ale Cheddar. During the previous cheese making process, curds were soaked with an IPA and a Nut Brown Ale from Shmaltz Brewing Company, a micro-brewery in upstate New York. This infused Vermont artisan cheese was then aged for a year, resulting in a nutty, medium sharp, moderately crumbly cheddar with a hoppy ale aroma and taste. As a bonus, the cheese is all natural, free of added hormones, kosher certified and made from sustainable farming products. The next batch of cheese — which is aging for another month — will be out soon and will contain two ales produced by Harpoon in Boston. Price: $7.99

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Arrogant Bastard Hot Sauce. Photo courtesy of Stone Brewing Company.

5. Beer Hot Sauce

Stone Brewing Companyā€™s Arrogant Bastard Ale is not for the timid. When people from Carlsbad Gourmet approached the brewery with the idea to make a hot sauce, the brewery responded with a proud ā€œLetā€™s make three!ā€. Thus the Burning Trinity of Bastard Hot Sauces was born. All these hot sauces are brewed, stewed and bottled on the edge of the California coast, just a few miles from the brewery. Now your food can be as feisty as your beer. Price: 3 for $20.

Drink

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Hophead Vodka. Photo courtesy of Anchor.

6. Hop-Based Craft Vodka

If you want hops in your glass crave something other than beer, check out Hophead Vodka. This libation is distilled from the same Washington-sourced hops used in San Francisco-based Anchor Brewing Company’s beers, and provides a twist on the typical vodka cocktail. This spirit captures the fresh, aromatic character of hops without the typical bitterness. Price: $42.99 for 750 milliliters.

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Terrapin Wake-n-Bake Coffee. Photo courtesy of Jittery Joe’s.

7. Beer-Flavored Coffee

Besides being known as the home of University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia has an identity based in beer. If you want to experience Athens beyond traditional tours and tastings, two local Athensā€™ businesses have partnered to create a memorable alternative that will have you asking ā€œWhy not beer for breakfast?ā€. Begin your day with a unique beer-inspired concoction courtesy of Jittery Joe’s Coffee and Terrapin Brewing Company. They offer Wake-n-Bake, a stout-flavored coffee designed to be black as night, thick, rich and full of flavor. The coffee is brewed with a special blend of beans inspired by what Terrapin uses when brewing their Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout. Price: $12.95 for a 12 ounce can.

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Cold In The Shadows Cocktail, which can be found at Seamstress in NYC. Photo courtesy of Jenny Lederer.

8. Make Your Own Beertail

If you want to get creative, consider mixing up your own ā€œbeertails.ā€ Pamela Wiznitzer at Seamstress in New York City loves to make cocktails with Campari and beer, and is willing to share one of her favorite recipes, ā€œCold in the Shadows.ā€ For this, youā€™ll need:

ā€¢ 1 oz. Campari
ā€¢ 1 oz. Lime Juice
ā€¢ Ā½ oz. Honey Syrup (1:1 ratio of honey to water)
ā€¢ Ā½ oz. St. George Raspberry Liqueur
ā€¢ Anderson Valley IPA

Combine all ingredients except for the IPA in a shaker. Whip shake (shake just a few times) and add in about 1 Ā½ oz. of IPA to the tin. Fill a high ball glass with crushed ice, strain the drink into the glass and garnish with slices of orange and lime and a straw.

Candies & Treats

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Beer Pretzel Ice Cream. Photo courtesy of Coolhaus.

9. Beer Ice Cream

Coolhaus was started by two women who loved baking cookies, making ice cream and putting the two delicious treats together, and started selling gourmet ice cream out of a beat-up old postal van. Now they own 11 ice cream trucks around the United States and have pre-packaged products in 3,000 stores nationwide. Beer-lovers can opt for their Beer & Pretzels flavor, which includes dark stout ice cream with salty pretzels (soon to be chocolate covered pretzels). In the fall, they also make Black Forest Cake with Chocolate Stout ice cream, which spikes chocolate molten cake ice cream with toasted coconut, Amarena cherries and Rasputin chocolate stout beer. Price: $6-7.50.

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LolliHOP. Photo courtesy of J. Robin Emmans.

10. LolliHOPS

Yakima Valley, a region once known for growing apples now supplies 77% of the hops in the United States. Founders of Yakima Hop Candy wanted to do something different with an ingredient that was a big part of their community’s identity. They started experimenting with a non-alcoholic hoppy beverage by infusing various combinations of hops, juniper berries and orange peel. One experiment led to a hop-infused ginger beer that tasted like candy and thus, the founders went off in a different direction. As it says on their website, ā€œAfter many batches of burnt sugar, candy so bitter it made our eyes cross, and funny-looking lollipops, we have a candy to be proud of.ā€ Try their lolliHOPS, infused with locally grown hops and other natural flavors. You can chose from a variety of flavors ranging from lemon to blood orange to pumpkin peach to chile lime. Price: 6 for $7.50.

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Beer Box Truffles. Photo courtesy of Nunu Chocolates.

11. Beer Truffles

Thanks to Brooklynā€™s Nunu Chocolates, six-packs need not strictly apply to bottles of beer. They have designed a box chocolate truffles where they infuse six different craft beers, from IPAs to Porters, directly into the ganache, enrobing the decadent boozy interior in a single-origin Colombian dark chocolate. Ā Price: 6 truffles for $12.

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Beer Nut Bark. Photo courtesy of Stacy’s Sweet Spot.

12. Beer Nut Brittles

Stacy, founder of Stacyā€™s Sweet Spot, always had a passion for chocolate, and eventually she decided to pursue her childhood dream in Smith Mountain Lake Virginia. If youā€™re nuts about beer, check out her line of nut brittles that include local craft beers from Parkway Brewing, Sunken City Brewing and Chaos Mountain Brewing. In fact, Bodacious Bacon Beer Brittle just won a 2015 Good Food Award in the confections division in January. Depending whether you can handle the heat, her beer brittles can include habenero for a tasty kick or a milder version with Dark beer, Virginia peanuts and sea salt. Keep an eye out for the upcoming opening of their new production facility that will include retail and a dessert cafe in Moneta, Virginia. Price: $9-$32.

By Katie Foote

Also Check Out:

Sipping Culture: Worldā€™s Best Beer Bike Tours

Ethiopian Culture: Exploring The Country Through BeerĀ 

Epic Brewcations: Top 8 International Beer Experiences

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Katie Foote

Katie Foote may be a physicist by trade but she spent several years travelling the world as much as possible. After four years of semi-nomadic life, she spent a couple years in Auckland, New Zealand and recently moved to Vancouver, Canada. Despite living more traditionally, she has insight on how to travel the world on a graduate student budget (cheap!), explore off-the-beaten-path destinations and authentically experiencing new places by connecting to locals. When she's not doing physics or globe-trotting, she likes kickboxing, yoga and exploring her extraordinary new backyard of British Columbia.

Katie Foote

Katie Foote may be a physicist by trade but she spent several years travelling the world as much as possible. After four years of semi-nomadic life, she spent a couple years in Auckland, New Zealand and recently moved to Vancouver, Canada. Despite living more traditionally, she has insight on how to travel the world on a graduate student budget (cheap!), explore off-the-beaten-path destinations and authentically experiencing new places by connecting to locals. When she's not doing physics or globe-trotting, she likes kickboxing, yoga and exploring her extraordinary new backyard of British Columbia.

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2 Comments

  1. You can make the Lollihops yourself. Looks like this was the original recipe inspiration for the Hops Candy business?

    http://www.celebrationgeneration.com/blog/2010/09/07/hop-flavored-beer-lollipops-recipe-lollihops/

    1. @Greg: Yum!

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