creative idea, need some help please

so i'm working on a crazy brewing project to supply me and a bunch of my buddies up at pitt with homebrew for the summer, and along with some basic stuff (some wheat beers amber/pale ales maybe a saison) I want to make up some creative stuff.

After reading revvy's post about using corn chips on the strange ingredients thread, I was inspired to make a "chips and salsa" beer. I'm still pretty much doing extract brews, but want to do a partial mash on this one so that i can have enough grain to absorb any residual oils in the corn chips ( revvy said it would work and he's never lead me astray) and I want to use tomatoes and maybe even a very small amount of garlic and cilantro in the boil. I cant lager to do a dos equis clone, but i was thinking maybe something along the lines of

4lbs pale ale malt
1 lb corn chips
3 lbs light dry malt extract
saaz hops?

aside from that i'm lost as to how to go about adding the other stuff, and worried about how tomotoes will affect the ph. any advice?

well like any fruit beer (or in this case vegetable beer) you want to add the tomatoes and what not to the secondary and rack your beer on top of it. if you do it in the primary the CO2 the yeast produce will drive off the aroma and flavor of the ingredients. now as far as how many tomatoes to add i cant really say, never used them in beer. but it will probably be several pounds. i would suggest chopping them up and freezing them in a sanitized bag then thawing them and blanching them to make sure they are safe for your brew.

I was actually wondering on how adding them to the boil would work, I don't really have the space for any secondarys right now because of how much is getting brewed. I could just throw it in primary after fermentation has died down that might work

i would go for adding them to the boil over dumping them in the primary. just because there is no good way of getting them in the primary without risking oxidation.

now this is the part that's confusing. whats the proper amount to add to the boil? just one plus a tiny bit of cilantro? more? for ten minutes for two minutes or for how long

your going to have to experiment. i would suggest separating 1 gallon batches and trying various amounts of tomato until you find the right amount. pain in the butt but it will work.

Lots of folks like tomato juice in their beer. So you could leave the tomatoes out and just mix the finished beer with some tomato juice. Jalapeno/serrano peppers would give it some spice.

I don't think I'd like much, if any, garlic or cilantro (or onion). I love garlic but it just doesn't sound good in beer. And I just don't like cilantro much (too 'grassy' for me).

As a test, you could try adding any of these ingredients to a glass of beer, just to give you idea of where the ingredient is taking it.

I was actually thinking maybe some chipotles for spice and a little smokey undertone

Also, this:
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/16836/41127

Sure you want 5 gal of this stuff?

Didn't Dogfish do an Australian "tree tomato" beer on one of the episodes of Brewmasters?

Supposed to be a different sort of fruit, but still maybe you could hunt that episode down and glean something from it.

I did watch that episoide and they basically threw stuff in the boil too

so as of right now for the chips and salsa beer heres the tenative partial mash recipe

3 pounds light dme
4 pounds pale ale malt
1 pound crushed corn chips
8 oz carapils
3 dried chipotles added to the mash to rehydrate (after the mash, i'll fish out the peppers and chop them up for later in the boil)

1 oz saaz at 60
2 chopped tomatoes and 1 oz saaz at 10 minutes
3 chopped up chipotles at 5

and then ferment with white labs 001 maybe?

has anyone used chipotles in beer before? if so how many

I wouldn't think that you'd get a very nice flavor out of adding tomatoes to the boil. With that grain bill the only way you're gonna get something palatable is by adding in fresh, super ripe, ultra sweet tomatoes in secondary. Go buy a tube of tomato paste and mix that with some bud and see if you like it before you boil tomatoes into a beer.

That being said, the rest of the beer sounds downright funky and I'm morbidly curious as to how it turns out.

I'm not really looking for an overwhelmingly tomatoey flavor though as much as i'm looking for some acidity to come through. do you think two tomatoes would be to much?

well I think if you're trying to, 'add acidity,' then you're trying to lower the pH, which might (I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to say) have an effect on your ferment (or is it only mash?).

Regardless, the acidity that you'll get from 2 tomatoes isn't very high, since tomatoes don't really have a whole lot of either citric acid or ascorbic acid, the 2 most common acids in fruit, so the effect of the acidity will be negligible, as will the flavor. There is also the issue that acidity given by fruit diminishes very, very quickly, especially in the presence of heat.

I would recommend that if you want flavor, again, tomatoes in secondary, and if you want acidity, serve it with a slice of lime. That will get you more direct, bright acidity and still be in line with the flavor profile you're looking to build into the beer.

edb23 said:

I'm not really looking for an overwhelmingly tomatoey flavor though as much as i'm looking for some acidity to come through. do you think two tomatoes would be to much?

Click to expand...

I think any tomato would be too much.


I know you said "crazy brewing experiment"
Have fun, hope it tastes better then it sounds