Herbs in non-hopped beers

[evildrakey]

I've used Elecampane in some of my beers, meads, and liqueurs... It's got an amazing aroma and flavour

 

[TimT]

Lovely! Adding Elecampane to my list.

One of my other successful brews last year - a Scottish light with tagetes. Tagetes are a South American flower often referred to as a type of marigold, though I don't think the two plants are related. They're edible (mostly, check the write up on Wikipedia), and have a delightful sweet/cordially/pineapply aroma that is perfect for brews. (In fact I think they may have been used in several South American beers). When I made my tagetes beer I just used a minimum of hops for bittering and skipped the flavour and aroma hopping. Popped tagetes, if I recall correctly, directly into the fermenter and the flavour and smell transferred nicely over to the final brew. My last one seemed to have lost a bit of the sweet floral scent but the flower intriguingly seems to have left a spicy and slightly peppery flavour behind. Really worth using.

 

[TimT]

Giving a strong dandelion tea a go at the moment. Slightly medicinal taste - but very spicy and a strong earthy bitterness; it could go very well in a brew.

My previous (very uncontrolled) experiment with lavender - after having tested 1) lavender, steeped in hot water following a boil, 2) lavender, boiled for 10 minutes, and 3) lavender, just steeped in cool water - they all taste the same! But lavender in boiling water tends to colour the water. The taste seems to me one that would work best with light additions of lavender, not strong additions.

 

[spassmaschine]

c) it's easy to over-emphasise the importance of laws relating to gruit or hops now - they may just be consequences of historical movements that we're ignorant of, rather than the cause of them.

This is a good point. In many ways, I think maybe it makes sense to treat the laws as a mere codification of the changes that have already happened on the ground.

I remember reading an article a while ago that argued hops only really became more popular (in England, anyway) from the 16th century, as common land and church land was privatised or enclosed, initially for more profitable wool production. Commoners were pushed off the land into urban slums, and no longer had the means to brew or traipse the commons for herbs; they no longer lived close to the land and had to buy things (and consequently get waged jobs) they might previously have made themselves. Brewing went from being something done in the village by small-scale alewives and brewsters, to something done by big urban brewers (i.e. those with the capital to buy up land and invest in the initial production systems necessary for a high yield). Hops became the herb of choice because of their higher yield, and because of their much-longer lasting preservative properties (i'm sceptical that this is necessarily true, at least compared to some herbs), meaning beer could be distributed much further afield and brewers could thus sell to a much greater market.

So: hops became widespread because of changes in social relations - changes in the way people were able to access all the things. The prevalence of hops in brewing is a mere byproduct (though a tasty one) of beer becoming largely a commercial product, a commodity, rather than something done as part of daily living.

On the other hand, I am writing this on a home-brewing forum, so that kinda throws a spanner in the whole argument.

Also the changes in property relationships i'm talking about can't easily be separated from the changes in religious worship you guys were talking about above, i.e. the rise of various branches of Protestantism may have mirrored the rise and fall of different social classes, in various times and places.


Plus I can't remember where I read any of that and may very well be making it up.

 

[spassmaschine]

P.S. more in line with the topic of the thread, at the moment I'm brewing a herb beer using the fruit of native hop bush (Dodonea viscosa). Apparently some of the early European settlers made a few brews with it before hops had been brought out here. No idea if it'll taste any good; I imagine in this case, the switch from hop bush to actual hops may have been entirely taste-based.

 

[TimT]

Sticky hop bush - another plant I want to try brewing with, Spassmachine.

I know so little about Australian plants but there must be many that would help make good brews.

Another reason hops may have become preferred was they were simpler: why fiddle around with concoctions of two, three, four, ten, twenty herbs when one will do the trick? This reason would be *especially* attractive to large-scale commercial brewers: it would simplify their task and make it cheaper.

Early use of the sticky hop bush (or other brews, for example, spruce beer) that colonial records of Australia and the Americas talk about is an interesting example of this: the colonialists didn't take commercial brewers with them. They may have had a ship's chef, and the task of the chef would have been to create *something* edible and drinkable from the available resources. And many times, colonialists would have simply been thrown back onto their own resources, and they would have brewed using techniques they learnt from their mums or their friends. So brewing techniques were much more innovative (and sometimes dangerous) than those that commercial brewers would have used.

 

[TimT]

My book The Drunken Botanist mentions that old brewers were often fond of using plant resins and saps, even pine cones, in beer. Stuff like myrrh, for instance. One of the things I really love about hops is their pine-iness - so, well, this naturally suggests to me that pine needles, pine cones, pine sap, fir, spruce, juniper, other conifers - which have all been used in ales in the past - could be used in the same way now.

 

[manticle]

Baron had a couple of beers using indigenous plants. Lemon myrtle and wattleseed are the two I remember.
Didn't mond the beers although they were hopped beers with those ingredients not an alternative to hops.

 

[TimT]

At the previous (and first) meeting of our north of Melbourne Merri Creek Brewer Masher Whatever The Hell We're Going To Call Ourselves Group someone mentioned to me a short run of 'black wattle seed beer' an Aussie brewer put out - wattle seeds providing the bitterness. That's interesting - during the holidays I saw those black wattle seeds everywhere. I assume it's the same plant. (I guess this is the brewer you're referring to.)

Lemon myrtle sounds delightful.

 

[spassmaschine]

I think more or less all wattle seeds in aus are edible, but there's a bit of variation from species to species. From what I've heard, the most palatable wattle seeds come from Wirilda (Acacia retinoides), which is more a coastal plant in Vic. No idea whether the seeds from the silver wattles and blackwoods and lightwoods we get along the creek are any good.

That Drunken Botanist book looks amazing. TimT, is it worth the buy, would you say?

 

[TimT]

Is it worth the buy? Yes! Readable, good list of plants - the only real problem being the lack of Australian plants. (Eucalyptus appears - not much else, I think). The focus is largely on the use of plants in spirits, but certainly gives lots of ideas about stuff you can do with those plants in spirits and wine and beer as well. Copious sections on wheat and barley and even yeast (that's a digression since yeast isn't really a plant) and hops, tables of herbs, etc. The author seems to be more of a spirit enthusiast than a beer enthusiast, but yeah. Lots of good stuff.

I got mine for Christmas which might explain why I'm so enthusiastic about it though.... definitely well worth the buy if you get someone else to get it for you!

 

[TimT]

Got some mugwort today. It's from the Artemisia family (so related to wormwood), and you see it popping up in old brew recipes, so I'm looking forward to using it. How good are naturalists and organic food stores? I mean, I know all that stuff - dandelion root, elderflower, elecampane, meadowsweet, etc - is supposed to be there for 'traditional medicinal uses' and all that (pretty sceptical about a lot of that) but me, I'm just interested in how it'll go in a brew. Great resource.

Incidentally , gave my garden saison - raspberry leaf, strawberry leaf, yarrow leaf, yarrow flower, and lemon rind added to the brew - a taste today. Lovely sour-bitterness, a kind of combination of gentle malt flavours and esters produced by the yeast. Should be good for bottling soon.

 

[Econwatson]

Not sure if you Aussies have it, but we have a beer called Fraoch brewed by Williams Brothers: http://www.williamsbrosbrew.com/beerboard/bottles/fraoch-heather-ale

It's quite tasty and lists Heather and Bogmyrtle as principal ingredients. Try and get a hold of a bottle, it's one of the few popular beers brewed with herbs here.

 

[TimT]

Today I've been brewing a porter with wormwood as the bittering. Base malt is Vienna, with some Munich malt and chocolate malt added to the mash. Added wormwood at the start of a one-hour boil and the smell quickly filled the house - beautiful minty-sweet smell. The taste it added to the wort was beautifully complex - bitter, but with liquorish and minty notes. To my nose it even had a kind of honey smell to it. (Especially fortunate as I plan to be adding honey to the brew in a day or two, at high krausen).

Wormwood beer, folks. It's good. Get into it.

 

[evildrakey]

Tim T - if you are willing to expand out to mead's, then Sir Kenelm Digby's 1669 manuscript for mead recipes is chock full of unusual recipes with herbs...

 

[TimT]

Oh yeah - I've got a few meads Evildrakey. My first was a Digby recipe (fairly simple one with sultanas and not much else), my later ones all have spice and herb additions. He has a few hopped meads too, I recall.

Digby is also an excellent source for other cooking information: he has one of the original recipes for the traditional English slipcoat cheese which I used as guidance when I made one recently.

 

[evildrakey]

My first was a Digby recipe (fairly simple one with sultanas and not much else)

Lady Belliasses Meath? Raisins and Cardamon?

 

[TimT]

Funnily enough I have the shortcut to Digby on my computer, so I'll just open up and have a look see....

Ah yes, probably was that recipe though I skipped the cardamom addition, possibly should not have as that may have helped to balance the mead out a bit better. It was my first mead, that one, and Digby was excellent - so many recipes, so many ideas.

 

[TimT]

Poured the first of my batch of yarrow beer last night. It had carbonated nicely (though maybe I might give it another week to come to full maturity), and had a nice round fruity sour-bitterness to it. (A lot of this probably came from the esters produced by the yeast rather than the yarrow).

But I noticed it had a funny effect - or should I say lack of effect - on me: when you drink hopped beers, you get a little hit of sleepiness because of the sedative effects of the hops. Not sure what happens when you drink a few, but usually your body seems to adjust to it somehow and you relax into it.

With the yarrow beer I didn't have the sleepy effect. I only noticed this a while after. Hm, I didn't get sleepy.....

Weird but not unpleasant. The best way of describing this surprise is by quoting a Mervyn Peake poem that has a similar surprise (a rather effective non-effect) in the last line:

O'er seas that have no beaches
To break their waves upon,
I floated with twelve peaches,
A sofa, and a swan;

The sharp waves broke above us,
The blunt waves broke around,
There was no-one to love us,
No hope of being found;

When, on the blank horizon
So endlessly adrip
I saw! All of a sudden -
No sign of any ship.

 

[TimT]

There's a good benefit for herbal beers - good beers for a break at work. If you can persuade your boss that no, no, it's all right to have a drink in the middle of the day, it's not going to make you sleepy because it doesn't have hops - you've got it made.

 

[GalBrew]

I think that you will be pushing **** uphill convincing your boss that the problem is the hops and not the ethanol. Or maybe we could all have a wine or a scotch with lunch?

 

[TimT]

Admittedly since I work at home and am just a contractor I don't have that much problem convincing my boss....

 

[TimT]

wine and scotch with lunch

Ah, the liquid lunch. But we all know about the 'long lunches' of the 70s, or the great drinkers of the past (Churchill, etc). Perhaps current intolerance to this concept points more to changing attitudes about drink.

 

[Hintadupfing]

http://www.gruitale.com/intro_en.htm

http://blacksmithsarms.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/hard-core-gruit/

 

[GalBrew]

wine and scotch with lunch

Ah, the liquid lunch. But we all know about the 'long lunches' of the 70s, or the great drinkers of the past (Churchill, etc). Perhaps current intolerance to this concept points more to changing attitudes about drink.

Truely a golden age in humanity. Unfortunately no such thing exists in my line of work.

 

[TimT]

Brew update: yesterday I took a sample from the wormwood porter - now slowing down fermenting, down to about 1.008 gravity - and had a taste test. Disgusting. Like strong medicine. Wormwood is overpowering (and my additions were pretty much the minimum amount recommended on the recipe). So tips for brewing wormwood in future: *really* small amounts, in combination with other herbs. (Or, easier, don't.) (But it would work if used judiciously - small, possibly other herbs and spices to round out the flavour, etc). I make these mistakes so you don't have to!

 

[Ross]

......It's why we use hops

Don't get me wrong, I love seeing people brew with ancient herbs & spices, but there's a reason beer is now made with hops - THEY TASTE BETTER.


Cheers Ross

 

[TimT]

Hops are what my mum would call an acquired taste. Folks who haven't tasted them before would take a bit of persuading before they really took to using them. It's worth it - they can add some wonderful properties to brews - but they are not fundamentally necessary for brewing. Many different flavourings have been used over the centuries, and I think they're probably worth a bit of time to get to know too

 

[SergeMarx]

Dodonaea viscosa - Native sticky Hop Bush.

Always wanted to try it - would love to find maltable native grain too, but that's possibly asking too much. apart from native rice maybe?

 

[thylacine]

Czech 'Nettle beer': http://www.beerpal.com/Dum-Kopøivové-Beer/31401/

Visited Prague's Pivovarsky Dum last November. Including their green coloured Nettle beer. Glass walls separated the functioning brewery from the restaurant. Enjoyed viewing three open fermentation tanks bubbling away just two metres away from our table. i.e.. through the glass wall...
Nettle was OK but my focus was on the city's growing "tank beer" offerings.

Cheers...