Tips For Making Braggot

[pdilley]

Quick post of some tips for tasty Braggots.

Good Braggots should have a lot of honey flavour + strong maltiness of Ales + good bitterness.

Bitterness aim for 65 IBU. 50 IBU in the boil (60 minutes), 10 IBU in the last 20 minutes, 5 IBU as pseudo-dry hopping.

For the simple extract style brewer look at
2 tins of liquid ME
or 6# of DME
10# of Blackberry Honey or some other dark meaty honey that has lots of natural higher levels of Maltose in them. (Blackberry at 11.33 Maltose vs Eucalyptus at 6.84 Maltose is closest match so far for Australia - probably Stringy Bark or darker meatier eucalyptus honeys.)

First boil your malt extract and do your bittering. Remember to add your honey after flameout or even wait longer until it has cooled down substantially to preserve the aroma and flavour of the honey that would be lost if you boiled it off.

You want fruity esters in Meads to enhance the flavour so lager yeasts are out. Pick a good ale yeast thats a favourite of yours, such as when making an English Bitter or Stout.

 

[notung]

I wonder if I am technically fermenting braggot at the moment...?

I recently brewed a ginger gruit ale, using a fairly standard ale grain bill and adding herbs/spices into the boil. 24 hours after pitching yeast, I boiled some water with more ginger and infused some more herbs/spices. When this infusion had cooled to 70C, I dissolved 1kg of yellow box honey. I let this whole lot cool down to blood temperature, then added it to primary.

What do you think? The leading flavours are *hoped* to be ginger and lemon balm, but I would like some of the sweetness and aroma of the honey to come through also.

 

[pdilley]

Braggots were blends of standard meads and ales so that the resulting mix was balanced in flavours between the meads honey and the ales maltiness. Today people are brewing both ingredients together. The honey component on the above listing (US 5 Gallon batch) shows that the honey component of a 18-19 litre batch of beer wort to fermemt out will be just over 4.5 kg of honey. 3 parts beer wort and one part honey. ~12% ABV

1kg is a very small component in a standard 23 litre batch and would fall closer to a honey ale with a very weak honey contribution. Any yummy smells of honey during fermentation is those aromas and flavours leaving your ferment. Honey is largely simple sugars so they will be easier for yeast to ferment than maltose.

Some also say Braggots are originally meads with hops and then later meads with malt and hops.

While you might technically not have a Braggot it might still be yum.

Mead names get complex when you start mixing styles of adjuncts.

I even have a recipe with lots of dandelions as a tonic mead so you see medicinal herbs in meads as the alcohol extracts the medicine out of the herbs and its a lot easier to swallow a mead than bitter medicinal herbs.

 

[Airgead]

Pete

As usual my way is a little different to yours :beer:

I usually shoot for 50% of the fermentables from malt and the other 50% from honey ( a good dark one). Malts are usually just Ale malt with a touch of crystal (maybe 2-5% or so) for colour and some sweetness.

Bitterness I'm usually aiming for the low to mid 20s to let this be a malt/honey driven style. A very light touch with late hopping. Maybe 10-20g of EKG or EKG/Fuggles blend at 10 mins for a little hop character.

Usually takes 3 months to hit its peak but its a great drop.

Edit - English ale yeast is what I would usually ferment with though I have done some nice ones with Cal Ale. I'm looking into maybe doing a honey lager when the weather cools down.

Cheers
Dave

 

[Bribie G]

My Braggot has gone as an offering to the beer Gods and went down the sink yesterday.
I used six jars of ALDI honey, a 2kg mash of Maris Otter, and the following flavourings:

30g Newport Hops 60 mins
A cinnamon stick
8 cloves
8 cardmom pods
a big knob of ginger grated

US - 05

It tasted exactly like pink trough lollies at a rough pub.

Maybe not add the spices but I still feel queasy <_<

 

[flattop]

Pink lollies... i've only had the yellow ones... you must be in the wrong dunny....