Since I have two beers aging right now, I thought I'd take this weekend to do an experiment. The experiment was to determine the viability of using roasted dandelion roots as either a bittering agent (in place of hops) or aromatic in my beer.

Using dandelions in beer is rare, but not unprecedented. New Belgium has a rather tasty Dandelion Ale, so I decided to start working toward understanding the taste and bittering qualities of dandelion. Fresh dandelion greens are not generally available until spring, so I thought I’d see what dandelion roots were like first.

If you don’t want to read through my entire process, here’s a quick summary, prefaced by a note: First off, this is experimentation. I’m trying to share the results of my experiments as I go through with them, which means not all of them will yield positive beer-worthy potential.

Dandelion roots fall into the “not gonna brew with it” category. In short, they simply don’t taste very good. The bittering quality is poor, the aroma is off-putting, and the taste can be described as kissing someone who just finished smoking an entire pack of cigarettes at very high concentrations or shoving a stale-but-dirty sock in your mouth at half that concentration.

If you'd like to read through my entire process and thoughts, take a look here: Experiment: Roasted Dandelion Roots