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?

  • poleslav@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    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.

      • poleslav@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        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!

          • poleslav@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            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…