Spices And Fruit Additions

[nabs478]

G'day,

I am planning to make a spice beer with the following non-standard ingredients and want to get peoples opinions on when they should be added. I have put my opinion next to each item. I am hoping to get peoples opinions who have used these ingredients before - not just what you reckon without prior experience.

Pulp/Juice from Oranges - 10 mins before flame out?

Cinamon Sticks - 10mins before flame out?

Powdered Nutmeg - 10mins before flame out?

Rind from oranges - 2 mins before flame out?

Crystalised ginger - 1min before flame out?

Finely Chopped Chillies - 1min before flame out?

Honey - Just after flame out?

I am obvisouly tossing up between trying to give enough time to extract the flavours, but not so much time that the volatile flavour components will be lost.

Thanks

Pip

 

[Beer Guy]

Honey is best when not heated over 70 degrees otherwise you lose the aromatics

 

[big d]

Hi Pip
The only suggestion i could give is to get in touch with Tom Smit of Jovial Monk in Adelaide.(He has a web site))He would have to be the spiced beer king.If theres a spiced beer style then chances are he has brewed it.

Cheers
Big D

 

[newguy]

I've brewed a few wits and I've added orange rind anywhere from for the entire boil down to flameout. In my experience, it doesn't really matter when it is added flavour-wise. You get a stronger orange aroma with late additions though.

Cinnamon sticks - 10 min sounds good. I've only used them once and that was 20 minutes before flameout - the result was good.

Honey ferments right out - it doesn't leave any sweetness and the aroma is debateable. If you want a honey sweetness, add it at flameout and use a low attenuating yeast like Wyeast 1968 Special London. The commercial honey beers around here add the honey just before bottling. They pasteurise to halt fermentation and to sterilise it. Difficult to do for a homebrewer.

Chillies - try dry hopping with them instead. That way you can monitor the "heat" and transfer the beer when it gets to the point you want.

 

[nabs478]

Honey is best when not heated over 70 degrees otherwise you lose the aromatics

This of course poses a slight problem, and honey is one thing I have pondered about quite a bit. I assume that honey needs to be sterilised somehow? Usually by heating it using the heat from the liquid after the boil? So maybe 70 C is just enough to sterilse it and without losing too much of the aromatics? But would be difficult to get just the right temperature. I am currently making 160L batches and it would take a few hours to cool from boil temp to 70 C. Brew days are already long enough!

I have made a honey beer before and added it just after flame out. The beer was fine, but didnt really taste like honey at all. I have been thinking that perhaps breweries add the honey to there beer after fermentation, then filter it, pasteurise it then force carbonate it and bottle it (so the sugar profile of the honey remains intact). I think this is a possibility because of the amazing likeness between some honey beers and the real taste of honey.

Does anyone know if this very honey like flavour in the final beer is achieved by the process above, or perhaps just by not letting the honey get above 70 C?

Also, do you reommend that you shouldnt take it to above 70 C because the aromatics are volatile and will leave, or because they will decompose? If the first is true then perhaps some type type of sealed heating container would do good job of sterilising the honey with out losing the flavours.

 

[nabs478]

Honey ferments right out - it doesn't leave any sweetness and the aroma is debateable. If you want a honey sweetness, add it at flameout and use a low attenuating yeast like Wyeast 1968 Special London. The commercial honey beers around here add the honey just before bottling. They pasteurise to halt fermentation and to sterilise it. Difficult to do for a homebrewer.

Very informative on the honey front, I have wondered about that.

Do you know if they usually pasteurise it by fast heating and coolingor by tight filtration to reomve all yeats cells? I am quite keen to try and do it.

Thanks for your other input too.

 

[Beer Guy]

heat the honey seperately hold it at between 65 and 70 degrees for at least 10 mins to sterilise then blend in with wort stream prior to heat exchanging yes honey aromatic is debatable and honey aromas are volotile compounds so they can and do flash off with heat.

 

[davedave]

Odd, I know, but honey is used as a disinfectant/antibiotic (even in Australian hospitals) so would it really need to be sterilised?
Equally, for those of us who do extract or mini mash brews, there is little to no attention to cooking out the extract which doesn't seem to cause any troubles.

 

[newguy]

Very informative on the honey front, I have wondered about that.

Do you know if they usually pasteurise it by fast heating and coolingor by tight filtration to reomve all yeats cells? I am quite keen to try and do it.

Thanks for your other input too.

Depends on the brewery. The big ones pasteurise everything anyway, so it's no problem for them to add the honey to the conditioning tank, immediately filter, then flash pasteurise, cool, & force carbonate on the way to the bottler. Flash pasteurisation entails heating up the beer in a relatively small diameter line as it is pumped from one vessel to another. Kind of like a cold plate for serving your beer, only it's used to heat it. Little breweries typically don't pasteurise so they depend on the filtering to remove all yeast & hopefully bacteria too. But honey beers are quite rare for the small breweries to produce. Must have something to do with lack of pasteurisation & stability of the bottled product. They really don't want bottle grenades. That would be bad for business.

Regarding pasteurising honey - yes honey does have lots of antimicrobial properties, but what about the beer you're adding it to? What if the spoon you used to scoop out the honey wasn't sterile - would the honey be sufficiently "strong" enough to kill the bacteria on the spoon before they got dropped into the beer & dispersed?

Pasteurisation time & temps - you'd have to look this up, but I think that the critical point is just below 70C but that it takes a long time at that temp to pasteurise. As the temp creeps up, the time required goes down. When I made my one and only mead a few years ago, I heated the honey to 80C then turned off the heat, sealed the pot, and let it cool down on its own. That took a few hours. I'm sure that it got properly pasteurised, and the mead turned out fine so it must have been sterile.

 

[Adamt]

Most honeys you'll find in the supermarket are pasteurised and probably contain preservatives, which arent generally good for brewing. Non-pasteurised honeys contain wild yeasts and the like from pollens/flowers the honey bees consume to excrete honey. These yeasts/bacteria are not active in honey due to the low water content, but when put in optimal growth conditions, like wort, they can fire up and can affect beer.

As far as using them in hospitals/whatever, that's completely different.

On the honey flavour front... the sugar profile of honeys is majorly fructose, glucose and maltose, which will ferment out completely. Different types of honey will have different profiles of non-basic sugars. Finding a honey with a higher proportion of non-basic sugars is the key to getting honey flavour in your final product, although over time (unless you pasteurise your beer/absolutely filter out yeast) the sugars will ferment and you will lose your flavour.

Cheers.

 

[Beer Guy]

For those interested in pastuerisation.

 

[mika]

Some time ago I added Honey (1.5kg, unpasturised, natural, no preservatives) to Secondary, just dumped it in the fermenter and racked the beer on top of it. It turned out fine and came thru with quite a honey taste, but that was in a KnK beer and I haven't since attempted to replicate it.
On occassion I have added Honey (500g) at 5mins before flame out and that worked out well, The honey could be tasted, but wasn't overly strong.

 

[///]

if you want to maintain maximum fruit flavour add in post ferment. yeast can absorb up to 25% of the colour of fruits like cherries and the sugars may fermented...