Hello Brewers!
I am still a noob to this, but I want to brew my wife something that she’d like.
I don’t yet have the equipment to do an all grain, and I am reliant on extracts.
I was wondering if anyone has experimented with adding flavour ingredients, like cherry for example, to an extract? If so, when and what have you added? And is this going to be an expensive process of trial and error?
Brewing is cool no matter how you do it. Don’t take anyone dissing on you because you don’t use all grain seriously. A two row can of extract can give the same base as mashing and lautering out the extract yourself from all grain.
Using extracts is not a hindrance, because you can use extract to create the base of the beer. If you want to do a multi-stage rest, you can do that with a tea bag of grain. Grab yourself a large mesh bag (they are not expensive) and you can do a whole lot with various grain without having to do the lautering process.
Get whatever specialty grain and place it in the mesh bag and then as you are mashing, you can hold the temperature at certain points. Conversion temperatures in the 140s 150s and 160s all have radically different taste profiles depending on the length of time and the grain. It’s all about time and temperature.
You can get all sorts of interesting notes just from the grain- cloves, a honey sweetness, chocolate, etc. Especially if you’re mixing in any grains like chocolate malt, black prince, or something with more floral notes. In my opinion, this is some of the most fun part of brewing.
But you can still do a lot without using any grain and just extract. I personally have used unsweetened cherry juice and quite a few of my brews. Knudsens is a brand that I use. I generally add it around when I add the finishing hops - at the end of boil around knockout.
I experimented with unsweetened cranberry juice in a ginger ale, using champagne yeast. It was a bit astringent, but was still very palatable and gosh very strong.If you are into sour beers, look into kettle souring. It’s also a really cool process. But it’s kind of a time commitment.
And a whole lot can depend on hop. Citra, Galaxy, Palisade, Clementine, etc will result in radically different taste profiles, when used as a finishing hop.
And you can split your cans of extract up, you don’t have to make a 5 gallon carboy of beer every time. A little gallon fermenter with a vapor lock is cheap, and you can do neat stuff that is not a big monetary commitment.
Thanks for posting. Have fun.
have you thought of doing a mead?
It’s on the list, but not something I’ve researched much yet. Do you recommend?
I’ve made a couple batches, mostly with honey and meadowsweet. Just remember to feed the brew with yeast nutrient along the way, so the fermentation doesn’t get stuck eating only sugars. I like to remove the carbonation before bottling, but that is up to personal taste.
You can also throw berries, spices into mead quite liberally. Absolutely simplest, stuff, the only catch is long fermentation times. Yet, you can get quite awesome products in half year with tart berries or fruits.
I remember a couple tasting our simple mead once, and wife turned to her husband and said “hey, when you did the brewing, why did not you brew something nice instead, like this stuff?” So I’m pretty sure this is your best guess.
I was wrong many times on the matter. We had an idea to make strawberry beer for ladies, like “chicks like strawberry” - wrong! Dudes were like “honey, try some of this!” and drank bottles after bottles of pink beer, while their gfs gorged on proper imperial and belge style stuff.
But mead is solid option, always. Just make sure spice is not chili, unless she is into it.
It’s what I brew.
Very easy to add botanicals, fruit or even spices to get something very easy to brew and drink.
I currently have a hopped mead and a ginger mead brewing, the ginger one is my current goto
- about 1.8kg of light colour/flavoured honey (currently using a lotus major)
- somewhere between 100g and 200g of grated root ginger
- make to 5l
- add champagne style yeast and nutrients
All the time! (Back when I was doing extract brews as well) typically I would use the lighter dry malt extracts when doing so. But at the end of the day using extracts only limits some of the different grain flavors you can get (and that’s if you don’t do a small muslin bag with grains for the first bit of heating the extract)
Things I’ve added that I can remember off the top of my head. In Secondary: vanilla beans, coffee beans, peaches, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, kiwi, ginger, cinnamon sticks. Making a tincture: Cacao Nibs, habanero peppers, Carolina reaper peppers, vanilla bean
For the expensive trial and error part, what id do when I wasn’t sure what fruits I’d want to use I’d brew 5 gallons of my base beer, and split it into 5 different fermenters and add whatever I was feeling into each then compare what I like most once it’s done in secondary.
Did you add them raw or boiled them down or something? And what was your best flavour?
It would depend on how lazy I was. For the fruits I’d heat them to 158F (70C) for 15 minutes while stirring constantly. But I’ve also been completely lazy and dumped in the blueberries without treating them in any other way besides freezing them. Since it’s in secondary and I tend to make higher abv beers I’m sure even that was most likely over kill. And it depends, my favorite is my chocolate hot pepper imperial stout, but my black berry Belgian triple was also really good. I think the only one I wasn’t a fan of was the kiwi, but I think it’s because I added too little to my beer to impart a significant taste, or I didn’t do the right base beer (I think a sour kiwi beer would be good but I haven’t made fermented beer in a while)
Over all, I recommend just playing around! I’ve made some abominations of fermented beverages (whiskey made from only hot Cheetos) sometimes it’s just more fun to experiment and see what you get!
Dude, it sounds like you only brew in a lab coat with big goggles when there’s a thunderstorm… & I like it!
Yeah that sounds about right lol. Any time I hear someone say “you can’t ferment x and have it be drinkable” I go out of my way to try and ferment it. I heard that about watermelon and the watermelon wine I made turned out great, and distilling it to moonshine made the best watermelon brandy I’ve ever had (every commercial one I tried has the artificial watermelon taste). I’ve also made milk wine. Maybe I am a mad scientist…
Oh man, that sounds frickn sweet. You should write a book.
