My Miracle Berry Fruit Tasting 25th Birthday Bonanza

A little while back now (but I've been a bit busy lately) I had a miracle berry fruit tasting party for my 25th birthday. What's a miracle berry you ask? Well it's a berry that when eaten, changes the perceived sweetness of food, or in other words, makes sour stuff taste sweet!

I ordered the berries from Think Geek. Each packet contained 10 lolly-type pills made from powdered/freeze dried miracle berry fruit. We each had half a pill, and then had some fun tasting an assortment of random things!

My mum and I spent ages making fruit skewers with grapefruit, orange, lemon, lime, apple, pineapple and strawberry. They looked really cute! I also bought vinegar, raspberries, pomegranate, salt n vinegar chips, and tomatoes.

I was really worried at first that there would be no effect - how embarrassing! But luckily, it really worked, although the effect was not quite as intense as I thought. It was a very strange experience, and I think it was different for everyone. Everyone had different favourite foods, and thought certain things changed more than others. Personally, my favourite thing was the lime. I found that strawberry and pineapple didn't change very much, and pink grapefruit (usually my favourite thing in the world) tasted really awful.

Some things that I thought might be good were actually quite gross. Vinegar tasted like lemonade for a split second, then it tasted like vinegar again and burnt your throat. I had read that Guinness beer tasted like chocolate, but I found that there was no change. Pickles grossed everyone out, and Philadelphia cheese seemed to be either a hit or miss, with some people swearing it tasted like cheesecake.

I had heaps of fun, and would definitely recommend this as a fun party idea. Some hints from my experience:

• When you're sending out an invite, send some links to wikipedia or other info sites for your guests to have a read of. When I first wrote the invite I realised that without this, it looked like I was inviting everyone over for an acid trip!
• Think Geek recommends 1/2 a tablet is a serve, but I recommend you budget one per person (we found that we went back for more since the effect faded after about 15 mins).
• Have an antacid on hand!!! I bought a whole packet of Rennie to reverse the acid torture.
• Have some normal food on hand for afterwards, something warm like meat pies and sausage rolls, to give your tongue and tummy a rest.
• Try a little bit of everything, and then go back and have lots of what you liked. The effect fades quite quickly, so you want to get in a lot of things before it wears off!

Happy Fruit Tasting!