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I have read that old time brew makers did everything they could to keep oakiness out of their brews. They'd seal the inside of their barrels with something - pitch, maybe? So oak is not necessarily an old world flavour. Smoke is more the thing in old time brews due to the way they kilned their...

...though I feel like I'm giving folks the wrong impression of the use of the plant in modern brewing. I think it has *great* potential; you've just got to get the flavour balance right.

Just looked up my recipe. For a standard batch of around 25 L I added approximately 100 g of horehound. For comparison, this is less than half the amount recommended in one of the horehound ale recipes given by Stephen Harrold Buhner. (He has two recipes containing horehound, but one also...

I have a whole bunch of dried horehound sitting right behind me in the study! It's not a favourite weed of the government or farmers - it sticks in the coats of cattle and sheep and spreads all over the place. But it does have a long long brewing history. it has a strong bitterness and an...

Yeah the flavour may not be so good, the beautiful thing about eucalyptus is the smell. If you can capture that in a beer you've got it made. Love to do it myself. One simple way might be by making a eucalyptus essence.

The alleged poor quality of eucalyptus honey is greatly overemphasised, probably because in America dodgy products like honey laced with eucalyptus oil were sometimes sold. Fact is many mead makers seem quite happy to use it, so if it works well in mead.... well, it'll be fine as an adjunct in...

Yes, cock ale is an old recipe and, judging from the amount of times it turns up in old books, quite a popular one. I want to do one myself some time. The secret is apparently in breaking the bones up, which releases all this gelatine into the brew, thus clarifying it. That and presumably the...

You can't use oil for beer! But I know what you mean. Successive years of corrupt governance and failed socialist economics have ruined the country's economy - in spite of the oil riches.

Never call me a Trump voter, but I'm planning to do a pumpkin ale soon.

Fifth comment down in link. It gives you a brown/portery ale.

Here's the recipe I was using.

Roast the chestnuts, shucked them out of their shells, then for good measure boiled the shells in a bit of water first before using that to mash the ground up chestnuts and grain. It was based on a recipe I found online which had similar measures (though I misread it at first, as they just...

I made chestnut beer recently, and instead of the chestnuts adding an expected couple of points to the OG of the beer (after mash and boil), I think they actually *detracted* from it. My theory is the chestnuts somehow screwed up the water pH during mash or, maybe, some of the chestnutty fats or...

There may have been a number of issues - how did you treat the sweet potato before (did you just grate it into the water? Did you boil it/bake it beforehand?) How did the sweet potato affect the water pH? Perhaps the mash would have benefited from a starch rest?

Intriguing, maybe another reason for traditional brews like ginger beer.

Even in case of a wildy infection after primary fermentation I'd still feel like just bottling it and ageing it. The effects of age on meads are remarkable, and most meads require a few months or even years to come good anyway.

Sounds like a wild yeast attacked it. What was the ABV?

"Pancreatic alpha amylase." Aw. Look at the cutesy-wutesy liddle thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycoside_hydrolase#/media/File:Pancreatic_alpha-amylase_1HNY.png

Lots of things seem to have some amylase in them. Obviously the moot question is how much. It would be interesting to know more about this little enzyme - how it comes about, how simple it is molecularly, and so on.

You wouldn't be making a beer then, you'd be making a wine. But I'm not sure how much you'd need to mash just with sweet potato alone anyway as it's - well, obviously - so *sweet* that you may not need to turn much starch into sugar.