Thanks by and large to Easter, spring is the primary season for jelly beans. Among the lemon and piña colada flavors are the black beans, the licorice. There are two—and only two—reactions to black licorice: You either love it, or you hate it. There’s no Switzerland when it comes to the assertive snap that is associated with the candy.
Licorice as we know it is the root of the Glycyrrhiza glabra plant, and while it’s common to think of it as being interchangeable with fennel, anise, or star anise, the plants are not actually related. Anise and licorice are often confused because the former is often used as flavoring in the latter, especially with candy.
That’s how I came to call Matt Lincecum, founder and brewer of Fremont Brewing in Seattle, Washington. For this column, we were thinking about anise, and thoughts drifted to Fremont’s The Rusty Nail, an imperial oatmeal stout aged in bourbon barrels with cinnamon and licorice flavors. We just assumed the brewers were using anise. “We actually haven’t played around with [anise],” explains Lincecum. “The flavors don’t always translate.”