What Happens When You Put 60 Grams Of Popping Boba In A Can Of Beer? This California Brewery Found Out

A beer that drinks like bubble tea

Alpha Acid has been brewing in Belmont for nearly 12 years, producing everything from IPAs and barrel-aged sours to stouts. Bozicevic says the brewery has amassed more than 700 original recipes over the years and keeps creating new ones.

Boba beer had been an idea floating around for some time.

Bozicevic says he has a habit of coming up with unusual beer concepts, putting them aside, and then watching another brewery eventually make something similar. When the boba idea came up again during a planning meeting, the team decided they actually needed to make it.

“I brought it up during a planning meeting, and everyone’s like, ‘Yes, all right, let’s like let’s do this. Let’s make sure it actually happens.’”

There was also a little competitive motivation.

“We realized there was like an urgency to win, or it wasn’t going to happen, or someone locally might just beat us to the punch, and then it seemed kind of silly brewing such a strange beer right after them,” Bozicevic says.

Turning bubble tea into beer, however, was considerably more complicated than simply tossing some boba into a fermenter. Alpha Acid Brewer and Head of Operations Bob Giosso says the brewery conducted a small test earlier this year, adding boba to its sour ale base and storing one test can warm and another cold for roughly six weeks to see what happened.

The brewery ultimately chose popping boba rather than the traditional tapioca pearls found in many bubble teas.

“We decided to use the popping boba as opposed to the tapioca because we had concerns the tapioca would just start to dissolve and just make a big mess in the bottom of the can,” Bozicevic says.

Every can was filled with boba by hand

Once Alpha Acid had a beer it liked, another logistical challenge emerged: getting the right amount of boba into every can.

The solution was decidedly low-tech.

“Literally a measuring cup, scale, and a prayer,” Giosso says.

Each empty can received roughly 60 grams of boba by hand before heading down the brewery’s small mobile canning line, where it was filled with beer and sealed.

“As they’re going down the conveyor into the filler, Bob was making sure that there was boba in every single one,” Bozicevic says.

The process was as fragrant as it was labor-intensive.

“I smelled like Boba for two days,” Giosso joked during the interview.

For this first run, Alpha Acid made only about 20 cases, essentially the smallest commercially practical batch the brewery could produce. The idea was to see whether the concept worked and how difficult it would be to manufacture before committing to more.

“Just to give it a test, but now that we know how to do it, we could ramp that up and do much larger batch if we wanted,” Giosso says.

Yes, you’re supposed to drink it with a boba straw

Alpha Acid initially planned to serve the beer in its regular pint glasses at the taproom. As the release approached, the brewery decided that didn’t quite capture the experience.

So it bought plastic bubble tea cups, lids, and oversized boba straws.

“There’s something satisfying about drinking it with the straw,” Bozicevic says. “Oh yeah, otherwise you’ve got all the boba at the bottom. You know, sipping it out of a glass. Nothing like drinking beer out of a straw. It’s a totally different experience.”

The beer itself is designed to taste more like milk tea than a conventional sour.

“Like it has that sweetness, and it has the thick creaminess of the milk tea,” Bozicevic says. “If anyone’s ever had a Thai iced tea, it has that same flavor and consistency.”

Underneath that sweetness is Alpha Acid’s kettle sour base, which adds enough acidity to keep the beer from becoming completely dessert-like.

“Everything you get from a bubble tea, but then you’ve got a little hint of tart to kind of like balance the sweetness and make it a little more dynamic,” Giosso says.

Bozicevic says drinking it is an unusual enough experience that the finished product almost feels like something other than beer.

“I drank one the other day, and it’s like it’s almost not like beer,” he says. “You have boba floating up, and it’s kind of its own standalone thing. Yeah, it’s fun.”

A brewery built for weird ideas

While putting popping boba inside a beer can isn’t exactly standard operating procedure, experimental releases aren’t unusual at Alpha Acid.

The brewery has tanks ranging from three to 15 barrels, letting its team produce small batches without committing substantial production capacity to an idea that may or may not work.

“We’ve always had room to do very one-off experimental type beers,” Giosso says.

Some of those beers have an additional benefit when customers encounter them at the taproom: They look so unusual that people immediately want to know what they are.

Giosso calls it the “fajita effect,” referring to what happens in a restaurant when a sizzling plate of fajitas travels through the dining room and suddenly everyone wants to order one.

A neon blue Jolly Rancher-inspired hard seltzer, for instance, has that effect.

“People see that and immediately want to try it just based on how it looks, and then find out that it’s actually pretty flavorful,” Giosso says.

The brewery’s back catalog includes a gummy bear beer, Gummi Bear Juice, where the brewery boiled 50lbs of real gummy bears per batch, and other experiments that even the people who created them occasionally forget.

“We’ve done so much dumb bullshit,” Bozicevic jokes.

During the pandemic, the brewery even took inspiration from the increasingly outrageous beers showing up on social media. After seeing a Buffalo wing-inspired beer gain attention online, the team started brainstorming how it could make something even more ridiculous: a beer inspired by chili dogs.

That led to “Sippin on Chili Dawg” made with cherrywood-smoked malt, which can impart a distinctly meaty character, plus a custom spice blend. The resulting concoction unexpectedly found a second life as a cooking beer, useful for everything from beer batter and brats to chili and marinades.

The boba beer fits into that same experimental philosophy, though Giosso says the brewery doesn’t generally hold meetings specifically devoted to dreaming up the strangest beer imaginable.

“They kind of have to just come to us organically,” he says. “We don’t really like to sit around and try and come up with the crazy.”

Bozicevic, apparently, is the exception.

“Oh, Kyle does on his personal time,” Giosso jokes.

And Alpha Acid isn’t finished pushing beer into unusual territory. The brewery is currently working on a second batch of Last Magic, an imperial barleywine inspired by Samuel Adams Utopias, targeting an alcohol content somewhere in the mid-20% range.

For now, though, the brewery’s strangest experiment might be the one that requires a straw.

And if those first 20 cases disappear quickly, there could be considerably more boba beer in Alpha Acid’s future.