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No, interesting idea though. It often benefits chucking this sort of stuff in the mash anyway - like you do with pumpkin beer, chestnut beer, or (sometimes) beetroot beer.

I have read - in Mosher's Radical Fermentation, I believe - that the less refined a sugar is the better it is for a brew as it tends to leave more character behind in the beer. (This seems in keeping with Jack of all Bier's observation that the darker the sugars are the more unfermentables it...

Not me. Sounds fun!

Yes, I read about those guys the other day. I'll stick with catching my own; it's not a difficult process and the expense isn't high - you can just use malt extract for the starters.

Again I suppose it depends.... one old trick for nudging a yeast to ferment out to higher and higher gravities is by gradually feeding it sugar throughout fermentation, so you reward the yeast that *doesn't* go dormant with more sugar hits. Then again adding honey late in fermentation is a...

I do wonder if the sugar is not only easy to ferment on its own, but somehow helps the yeast along in its job of fermenting the wort. I kind of suspect it does, maybe if there are more simple sugars in the wort it's easier for the yeast to keep working, whereas if it's all complex sugars the...

I generally find them to be more fermentable than wort so they tend to make the brew drier. Be careful when buying molasses as some of the varieties you find the store have been sulfated, and after fermentation they will leave an unpleasant sulfur odour. The ones without sulfur will usually...

Welcome aboard! Yeah I've been asking around about the advice that you should never use eucalyptus honey and it sounds like it's a myth. It may have had something to do with the sort of honey they sold in the US for a while, honey that had been adulterated with eucalyptus oil to give it a...

Good thoughts about brewing history Feldon. You make the point very well about the importance of seasonaility; I tend to think that the great variety of traditional brewing ingredients found - from the exceedingly gentle (yarrow, meadowsweet) to the superlatively bitter (hops, gentian) indicate...

Yes it really does get very speculative when we get way back into the era of ale in every house - when ale was brewed every day, who would bother writing down all the recipes?

So why are gruits divided into Hopped Vs NON-Hopped? Hops impart a pleasant bittering, surely they would bring good things into any gruit. Agree. Also people today will talk of a single herb beer as being a gruit brew which seems to be historically quite inaccurate. But I think it's good...

(Not sure how the double up post happened but mods, would someone please be able to clean up the mess I made, wah wah, I'm a big baby....)

Please do! Was it a gruit without hops or with hops? (Many of the recipes on gruitale.com contain hops as well).

Hey Clinton, it's super that you're able to brew safely again. I know Chris at our club was of the opinion that your problem was caused by a persistent mould of some sort, which sounded possible and seems to fit with your description of your old house - what do you reckon? Was it a wild yeast...

I don't mind grassy woody flavours so I'd probably prepare a brew with that in mind! But seriously, hope you get this sorted.

Well, I had some gruit yesterday and it was very pleasant. The herbs (which admittedly I went a little over the top with) all combined together to have a kind of pot pourri effect - very lovely on the nose, with a nice savoury-spicy-bitter flavour that balanced out the sweet and sour of the...

Sounds delicious! Especially the 'moths' part. Damn my spelling! I'd do something to change it if I wasn't so amused at the results.

I didn't know about birch beer! I just googled that and got some very interesting hits. Spruce beer I rate quite highly, also fir beer - in either case the conifery taste really seems to smooth over the acidity of the brew, and the aroma (especially with fir beer) can be quite pleasant. I'd love...

Like everything else then? Yeah I knew about the carcinogen connection.

(Bracken fern beer - what'd it taste like Mark?)