Honey ale

scrapsmac

Well Extract #1 was a red irish ale. It's a week in the fermenter and has dropped from an OG of 1.043 to 1.014 so it's coming along nicely.

For my next brew I'm thinking of a simple ale with a nice honey aftertaste/residue.

I read a recipe over on homebrewforum which used:

2kg LME
1kg Clear honey
0.2kg Amber malt

and East Kent Goldings for bittering and aroma.

It sounds lovely but the brewer commented that it was quite thin. Any ideas how I can get a fuller taste?

BeerNut

Why LME rather than spraymalt?

Lots of ways you can get a fuller taste: more interesting hops, more specialty grains. But all of that will just take away from the honey taste and I'm told that, because honey is so very fermentable, it's hard to get anything much left behind when you use it.

scrapsmac

I read that too. Any suggestions for hops/grains beernut?

BeerNut

It really depends what you're trying to achieve. I'd suggest keeping it simple so at least you'll learn what is doing what. If I were doing that recipe I'd probably use 2kg of spraymalt, 500g of amber malt, the honey, and stick to the English hops at 60, 30 and 10 minutes, 30, 30 and 20g respectively. My software says that would give me a starting gravity of 1.055 at 20L and 35 IBUS. Ferment with US-05, and see what happens. It should end up around 5.4% ABV.

mayto

You could try priming a few bottles with honey too. It will be a small quantity of honey but the aroma will be trapped in the bottle. It turned out well for a beer I tasted. I think he just used honey straight from the jar and did not sterilise etc. Worked fine, of course boiling the honey will drive off flavour your after.

BeerNut

Putting the kilo of honey in seconday would be interesting, but that's something where I'd scale the whole thing down to 5 litres and use a demi in case it went disastrously wrong.

scrapsmac

I had planned on simmering the honey in a pot and adding the honey mixture to the boiler after flame out?

Priming with honey sounds like a good idea. I also read that darker honeys will leave more residual taste (and obviously a darker coloured brew).

getz

scrapsmac wrote: »

Well Extract #1 was a red irish ale. It's a week in the fermenter and has dropped from an OG of 1.043 to 1.014 so it's coming along nicely.

For my next brew I'm thinking of a simple ale with a nice honey aftertaste/residue.

I read a recipe over on homebrewforum which used:

2kg LME
1kg Clear honey
0.2kg Amber malt

and East Kent Goldings for bittering and aroma.

It sounds lovely but the brewer commented that it was quite thin. Any ideas how I can get a fuller taste?

are you talking about the alcoholic drink made from honey and water fermented with yeast,often with added spices,it was know in ancient times and was drunk by greeks,britons,and norse, well thats called mead.

BeerNut

If we're getting into technicalities, the recipe is a braggot, rather than a beer or mead.

scrapsmac

getz wrote: »

are you talking about the alcoholic drink made from honey and water fermented with yeast,often with added spices,it was know in ancient times and was drunk by greeks,britons,and norse, well thats called mead.

nope I'm looking at a simple blonde ale made with honey. I felt like experimenting a little.

On a side note, I was going to give mead a bash a while back but I'm quite impatient haha

Martyn1989

I made a honey ale last July.

I used:
2kg light DME
200g 'Pale Malt' (I got this in My Beer and Wine I presume it was marris otter)
A 907g jar of Boyne Valley Honey.

20g Northern Brewer @ 60
10g Chinook @15
0

Safale US-05 (rehydrated)

I followed the normal extract method and added the honey @ flameout.

I had an abv of 5.3%

It was popular with some of my friends and family but I personally didnt enjoy it until about October after it had mellowed out.
There was a distinct honey flavour in there, if I was doing it again I would up the grain bill and up the hops and try the honey in the 2nd fermenter.
I remember during fermentation there was an incredibly strong smell of bananas coming from the fermenter.

Heres a link to a thread I was asking questions on http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056195979
(It says in the thread I used 950g of honey but my notes say 907g, I think I just made a mistake while posting)
Also the banana flavour did practically disappear after about 4 months.