Brewing With Beetroot

[neonmeate]

ok i found someone even crazier about beetroot than me: this guy has literally written a tome on the vegetable!

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/S...m/beetroot6.htm
apparently it's an antioxidant, anticarcinogen, aphrodisiac, anti-depressant, mild laxative and stimulant to the immune system.... and of its carbohydrate content, virtually all of it (whether raw or cooked) is sugar. starch is present but in very small amounts, and there's negligible starch in pickled form for some reason.

so there you go. i don't think mashing is needed.

 

[Simon W]

.... and of its carbohydrate content, virtually all of it (whether raw or cooked) is sugar....

Isn't white sugar in the US beet sugar, like ours is cane sugar?
I think I read that in Palmer's book or somethng.

 

[Malnourished]

so there you go. i don't think mashing is needed.

Right, that's it. I'm adding some to secondary.

Does anybody know how much starch is too much? Assuming starch has the potential to give the same carbonation as sugar, the starch in 1kg of beetroot in 20L of beer has the potential to produce as much CO2 as 7g of sugar would.

Seems pretty minimal to me, but over time, wouldn't the starches would be eaten by non-saccharomyces strains which would in turn also have the ability to ferment dextrins etc. that aren't fermentable by sacch.? But these yeast/bacteria would have to already be in the beer (in however small concentrations) anyway, so they could potentially be eating dextrins in every beer brewed, wouldn't they?

Guess I'll bottle in heavy glass and find out!

 

[BrissyBrew]

I have had beetroot wine, all I can say is I dont remember much except for the next day feelling rather nasty

 

[poppa joe]

Looks like we might need" JAMIE OLIVER "on this one :blink:
Cheers
PJ :beerbang:

 

[tangent]

good to see you're using non-tinned beetroot
i dare say, that's what most people would be used to in Oz for burgers etc. and why a lot of people don't like it.
It's like tuna, the good stuff doesn't go in a can. The difference between a tuna steak and tuna from the can is HUGE.
I'd hazard a guess that the tinned stuff is stabilised with a food acid, so maybe just add some juice to secondary for colour.

 

[Malnourished]

In case anyone's interested, the beer is now bottled and conditioned, and it's actually quite good! Perhaps not coincidentally it doesn't taste a great deal of beetroot, but it does seem to have a soft, fruity sweetness not dissimilar to beetroot and it has a bit of earthy, beetroot skin character in the finish.

That Dupont yeast is incredible stuff. I pitched 31C (not a typo) wort onto a yeast cake and it's WAY cleaner than fermenting at 23-25C. And not surprisingly it finishes a lot quicker too!

 

[Stuster]

Wow. What a colour. Good to hear about the results of the experiment, Malnourished (no longer).

I wonder how much of that flavour is coming from the yeast. Was it the White Labs one, or cultured up from the bottle? Sounds like a great yeast for the summer.