An overflowing bowl of beer nuts on a wooden board with a glass of beer on a napkin beside it.

5 from 1 vote

Beer Nuts

These beer nuts are ridiculously easy to make at home and taste infinitely better than store-bought because they actually have beer in them. Along with sriracha, butter, and brown sugar.

Prep Time10

Cook Time15

Total Time25

Course: Snacks

Cuisine: American

Servings: servings

Calories: 448

Ingredients

▢ 1/3 cup IPA, plus more for the cook
▢ 1/2 cup brown sugar
▢ 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
▢ 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon store-bought or homemade Sriracha sauce, or to taste
▢ 2 1/2 to 3 cups salted mixed nuts*, (include plenty of peanuts if you want to be economical)
▢ Pinch cayenne

US - Metric

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Line a rimmed baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper.
Dump the beer and brown sugar in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Bring to a boil and let it cook, without stirring or otherwise disturbing the contents of the pan, for 3 minutes.
Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the butter and Sriracha until everything is completely incorporated. (If you want your beer nuts to have just the slightest trace of warmth, use just 1/4 teaspoon Sriracha. If you want your beer nuts to have more of a discernible kick, use 3/4 teaspoon or more.) Add the nuts and stir until each nut is well coated.
Spread the nuts evenly in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 6 minutes. Stir the nuts well and then bake for an additional 6 to 8 minutes. The syrup mixture should be bubbling pretty vigorously when you remove the baking sheet from the oven. Sprinkle with the cayenne. Let the mixture cool to room temperature. As the nuts cool, the coating will go from bubbly to gooey to stretchy to sticky to crisp. [Editor's Note: If the nuts remain in the sticky stage when cooled, then they weren't in the oven quite long enough. Next time, leave them for the entire 8 minutes after stirring.]
Break the nuts apart, if necessary. Toss them in a bowl and serve alongside a fresh IPA if you've already finished off the rest of the bottle used in the recipe.

Notes

How To Decide Which Nuts To Use

There are a lot of different combinations of mixed nuts out there. Good grief. And we thought trying to decide which toothpaste to use was tricky. We tried this beer nuts recipe with several different mixes of salted nuts and we loved ’em all, which is a damn good thing given how pricey nuts are these days. And if you need to make this recipe eminently economical, simply do what we did and make the recipe with 50% peanuts and 50% mixed nuts. Heck, you could even make the entire batch of beer nuts with nothing but peanuts, and we bet you’d hear no complaints. We certainly didn’t.

Nutrition