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homebrew·homebrew for any brew that you dobyJoYo

Periodic: Whatcha got fermenting?

I wanna hear about your homebrew projects.

I'm not doing anything to wild but I've got a Munich lager and another Munich lager that are finishing off.

I wanna do another Munich lager, what do you think?

View original on lemmy.ml

10 replies

lemmy.ml

Currently a belgian blond ale infused with black ceylon tea (added 7 g/l for about 4 minutes at flameout). It's my first tea beer, I already did a very similar recipe minus the tea and it turned out great so I have relatively high hopes.

2
JoYoreply
lemmy.ml

hops and tea? im excited for you. sounds like a gruit almost.

2
fdagpigjreply
lemmy.ml

Update: It's done now (bottled a week ago). I haven't gotten external opinions on it yet but I think it turned out a good beer, but you probably wouldn't be able to pinpoint tea as an ingredient if you didn't know. It probably does give a bit of extra depth of flavour, but it's not distinctly tea-like. I'm saving the last bottle of my 1st batch to do a side-by-side comparison with this, ideally with someone else who would be big into beer.

Next time I do a tea beer I'll probably use 10 g/l and let it steep for longer, maybe till the end of cooling. Maybe to be on the safe side I should tone down the bittering hops to compensate. I wish I knew how to account for the tea's bitterness in the IBU calculation.

2
JoYoreply
lemmy.ml

25 liter

now you gotta find enough people to drink 20 liters of belgian.

2

LOL! Thankfully I actually grew to kinda like it what with drinking most of my product myself. (Also the final yield is more like 16–17 liters).

2
fdagpigjreply
lemmy.ml

yea both. I was tempted to use only tea for bittering but figured I'd try something safer first for a few reasons.

  1. It's hard to find information about how much tea to use to get an appropriate level of taste and bitterness.
  2. Virtually all of the english-language sources ^(seeing as I'm nowhere close to fluency in chinese or any other language that might have more sources available on this topic)^ I could find online were using both.
  3. Since the recipe it's based on was such a success I figure even if you can't really taste the tea in this, it should still turn out good. The only other change I made was replacing the yeast strain (I tried to pick a similar but cheaper yeast this time around). Though it's also possible that eg. my temperature control during the mash the first time around was poor enough to have an impact, since that one was my first own brew ever.
  4. I'm not doing micro-brews at this point (am using a 25 liter pot) so I don't want to risk making an undrinkable batch if I can help it.

I only have one fermentation vessel and I'll be making a stout next (looking forward to that, I have it planned out already) but after that I'll take into consideration the outcome of this brew for my next tea beer. I'll be bottling it in just a few days here I think.

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JoYoreply
lemmy.ml

which hops? you can taste the mash, tea, and hops pre fermentation to get an idea of how bitter it became. a lot can happen during fermentation and bottling to change it but it does give a good idea of where you're at.

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fdagpigjreply
lemmy.ml

Styrian Savinjski Golding, which I used both for bittering and aroma. I do already always taste the chilled wort post-boil after measuring the OG, mostly out of curiosity moreso since I don't really yet have a clear grasp of what that might say about how the beer turns out. Interesting tip to taste the ingredients after taking them out. Although I only have one hop bag that I added all of the hops and tea into at different times, not sure if that complicates it (I used to not even have the one, but I figured it'd make siphoning, cleaning etc. easier). Would the "trash" (used mash, hops etc.) being bitter indicate that the beer will also be bitter or is it inversely related?

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JoYoreply
lemmy.ml

If it's not bitter at all then the mash will be overly sweet and starchy. I would drink the gravity measurement sample rather than pour it back in.

1

I don't drink the whole sample because it tastes so bad. But I don't pour it back in either to minimise risk of contamination.

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