Unpeeling Banana’s Appeal in Beer

When DankHouse Brewing received an invite to pour beer at the Juicy Brews IPA festival, co-founder Josh Lange knew he’d bring Banana Peel’d, a hazy IPA flavored with banana purée. “It was one of our most popular beers,” says Lange, who opened DankHouse in Newark, Ohio, in 2017 with his wife, Heather.

Several days before shipping beers to Juicy Brews, slated for February 2020 in Pittsburgh, the couple were dissatisfied with the banana taste. We were like, ‘What can we do to get more banana flavor?’” Josh recalls.

Bulk aseptic banana purée couldn’t be shipped in time, so the couple blended store-bought bananas. The oxidation lent an unappetizing brown tint. Dried banana chips also flopped. Then a discovery: Their favored purée was basically just Gerber banana baby food. The couple hit every grocery store in Newark, about 40 miles east of Columbus, to buy banana baby food for a “scooping party,” Lange says, to amplify the beer’s banana flavor. At the festival, DankHouse served beer a few booths from The Alchemist. “They’re pouring Heady Topper, and we’re laughing at ourselves with banana baby food IPA,” Lange says.

Bananas are interlinked with beer, from the yeast-supplied scent of German hefeweizens to purée-packed pastry stouts evoking a banana-split sundae. Achieving an intense banana aroma isn’t always easy, requiring brewers to stress out yeast strains, seek out dried bananas from Southeast Asia, and receive special federal approval. Until late last year, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) required breweries to submit formula exemptions to brew with bananas because they were not considered a traditional brewing ingredient like malts or hops.

Why are brewers so, well, bananas over the fruit? Let’s unpeel the appeal.

Eau de Bananas

A century ago, Americans ate a different banana. The thick-peeled, densely bunched cultivar Gros Michel, or Big Mike, once dominated the market. It contained high levels of isoamyl acetate, a fruity ester that provides bananas with their signature flavor. By the 1950s, a fungal outbreak decimated Gros Michel, which gave way to Cavendish bananas sold far and wide. The Cavendish variety contains lower levels of isoamyl acetate, creating a disconnect for fans of candies such as Runts or Laffy Taffy; they’re flavored with artificial banana flavorings heavy on isoamyl acetate.

All beers contain isoamyl acetate—Coors Banquet, in particular, has a noticeable banana element that develops during its cold fermentation—and too much is deemed an off flavor. “Banana in your beer sometimes means that you’ve screwed something up,” Lange says. Yet banana is a German hefeweizen’s signature scent that straddles a fragrant line between real and fake. “If you opened up a banana, it wouldn’t smell like hefeweizen,” says Derek Goodman, head brewer at Westbound & Down Brewing, which operates four Colorado locations. “If you crunch up banana Runts, that’s what a hefeweizen smells like.”

Goodman’s favorite, and most challenging, beer to make is the hefeweizen Don’t Hassle the Hef, which earned a silver medal at 2024’s Great American Beer Festival. To coax out big aromas of bananas and oranges, Goodman pitches one-third the recommended amount of yeast and minimizes available oxygen. “There’s too much wort for the yeast, but it gets greedy and tries to rapidly reproduce to catch up and make up for its lack of oxygen,” Goodman says. “That’s what produces these fruity esters.”

At Wallenpaupack Brewing in Hawley, Pa., flagship Hawley Hefeweizen is sometimes ordered according to its signature flavor. “People ask for the banana beer, or they tell us that they can really taste the bananas in it,” says Logan Ackerley, head brewer.

Maybe we’re entering a banana moment? Over the last few years, Jeff Mello, founder of Nashville yeast suppliers Bootleg Biology and Spot Yeast, has seen increasing interest in hefeweizen yeast. It’s now the second best-selling strain for Spot Yeast, trailing only the hazy IPA yeast. “I can’t keep it in stock,” says Mello, who points me to the late-August Banana Brunch at Nashville’s Fait La Force Brewing. The stars: ice cream and hefeweizen.

Stouts Go Wild Over Dried Thai Bananas

Today’s beer customers seek dynamic flavors. Even super-stressed hefeweizen yeast can only supply so much isoamyl acetate. Seeking intense banana experiences, breweries are buying bulk puréed bananas to channel desserts.

WeldWerks Brewing in Greeley, Colo., makes beers such as Chocolate Banana Pudding Stout, while Crooked Hammock Brewery of Lewes, Del., plays on chocolate-dipped bananas in the cheekily named Banana Hammock, a Belgian-style quadrupel with cocoa nibs and bananas. “It’s a no-brainer combination,” Crooked Hammock director of brewing operations Larry Horwitz says. “The fruit’s aromas accentuate the sweetness and fullness of the beer.” To make the 15% ABV wintertime warmer, Horwitz feeds the beer sugary banana pureé once primary fermentation has finished to prevent the yeast’s “Cheetos dilemma” of favoring junk food over healthy food. Imagine reclining on a couch, bagged crunchy snacks on your stomach, salad in the kitchen. “Do you really want to get up and walk in the kitchen?” Horwitz says, laughing. “Yeast shut down when they get tons of simple sugar.”

Adding bananas during fermentation can produce excess sulfur and off flavors, says Nick Panchamé, president of HOMES Brewery in Ann Arbor, Mich. He adds banana purée post-fermentation to beers and Smooj hard smoothies to add residual sweetness and boost body. The thicker texture of banana-infused anything can be divisive. “There’s a subset of people who really do hate it,” Panchamé says. The runaround is a not-so-secret ingredient: dried wild Thai banana.

Around 12 years ago, Rare Tea Cellar CEO and president Rodrick Markus began importing the “Grand Cru of bananas,” as he calls it. As with every ingredient, he doused the fructose-rich dried banana with hot water to assess its usefulness in syrups, spirits, and beer. “It’s this perfect way of infusing banana flavor,” says Markus, who is based in Chicago. Around 99 percent of his Thai bananas go into granola. But in 2019, as pastry stouts gained traction, craft breweries such as Other Half and Evil Twin championed infusing imperial stouts with wild Thai bananas. It imparted concentrated banana flavor without altering the body or creating fermentation flaws. “We call it the ingredient that kept us alive during Covid,” says Markus, who typically has a deep roster of restaurant clients. “When we went down to one wholesale order in Chicago, we were still selling about 1,000 pounds of the banana weekly.”

Matt Tarpey buys wild Thai bananas in bulk for the imperial stouts and barleywines at The Veil Brewing in Richmond, Va. “If you really want that crazy banana character, you need more than 10 pounds per barrel,” says Tarpey, head brewer and cofounder. At the current price of $50 per pound—and likely higher, given the current 35% tariffs on Thailand—“it gets really expensive really quick.” Profit margins are skinny on extravagant barrel-aged imperial stouts such as Sky Summoner, which is conditioned on vanilla beans, toasted coconut, and Thai banana. “We’re not losing money on them, but they’re not a huge moneymaker for us,” Tarpey says. “It’s a labor of love.”

At Crooked Hammock, Horwitz and the brewing team used to hand peel, macerate, and then blend bananas to make Banana Hammock. Now the brewery sources bulk banana purée and juice, but Horwitz can’t resist adding a few whole bananas to the brew kettle. Says Horwitz, “It just feels right to peel a banana and throw it in there.”

One thing is certain: There sure are a bunch of different ways to bring bananas into beer.

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