electric_beer

Recipes 

Do you add the banana to the mash and mash per usual? Do you freeze or mashup the banana or put it in whole and fresh? This should dry a beer out, yes?

Heckle

Recipes 

This has been a great read! I have only done extract kits and never done any AG brews. I may grab some ingredients to do a gallon test batch and see what I can come up with.

starrfish

Recipes 

to update:
just tried last small bottle of "zombie apocalypto" grocery store experiment:

smells of spice, cloudy, very fizzy, no head & a bit cidery... black pepper back of the throat sting... ( I'll never brew with black pepper again! and I didn't use much 1/4 tsp to gallon)

made the mistake of putting 1 bottle in a 22oz bomber... just going to let that ride to see how the black pepper ages...


all in all no oxidation no cardboard flavor (surprising considering NO HOPS!!)
could have been REALLy good w/o black pepper.

BUT would do the "job" when the zombies come... JUst remember the line from "shawn of the dead"..." ...any of you C***'s want a drink!"

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samljer

Recipes 

Actually from what I did was kept the mash at 27*C
anything higher kills the amalyse in a banana.
its also a lot slower then other sources but it DOES
work!

It also thickened the beer up a bit, made it smooth
like if the beer had oat in it.

Keep in mind though, this thread is about experimenting
and this is a source not to dismiss, when doing just that

rhoadsrage

Recipes 

Just ran into this threat and read the whole thing. I will have a whole new challenge next time I walk into the grocery store. Two things of that come to mind.

1) I read an article in BYO awhile back about a doctor that used probiotic supplements to ferment a beer, without yeast. It turned out pretty well. I wonder if they would also break down complex sugars awell.

2) I have had Kvass once, and seen many recipes on homebrew sites, but it is basically soaking rye bread in water and then adding sugar and yeast (often bread yeast). That would be a quick and dirty GaP beer. You could probably mix all the ingredients on the way home.

3) I see Kombucha tea popping up in more and more places so you could use a bottle of that to make a tart more berlinner weisse beer which doesn't require much bitterness anyhow so the hops wouldn't be missed.

samljer

Recipes 

RE #1) You could, but I wouldnt, people have also used stuff like BEANO
to break down carbs. again, i wouldnt.

RE #2) Thats prison brew ! lol bread + Ketchup + yeast = brew, but id
imagine it would taste like brewed anus. but yes, that works 100%

RE #3) Not sure what kombucha tea is, but i once made a "green tea"
beer by brewing a green tea at half strength, adding sugar and yest
when it was all done, a touch of lime and aged it.
It was pretty good havent made it since, but one day i may, dunno.

mullenite

Recipes 

Kvass is interesting. The best way to describe it I think would be to say it tastes like rye/pumpernickel swirl and honey butter....

rhoadsrage

Recipes 

Beano is a dense packet of enzymes that can eat through lots of complex sugars specifically polysaccharides and oligosaccharides and , remember it is also expected to lose quite a bit of the enzymes in stomach acids. So you will get a very light, dry, think Miller 64 low carb beer.

Probiotics, OTOH, are live microorganisms. Most probiotics contain Lactobacilis or other Lactic Acid Bacteria. If you look on the label some will also have yeast strains.

Here is the article I was talking about.
http://www.byo.com/stories/article/indices/36-homebrew-stories/1751-pharmacy-brewing-last-call

MacBruver

Recipes 

Just saw something that really got the gears turning in my head. Earlier in the thread, there was some talk about bananas and their alpha amylase content. I've been doing a bit of reading about sweet potatoes, and they are chock full of beta amylases. With both of those, you could potentially have enough diastatic power to actually fully convert wheat or barley. It would require a LOOONG step mash starting at around 100f, but it could certainly make for an interesting brew.

I think a Banana / Sweet potato ale could be really interesting.

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Secondary: Bee Cave Robust Porter (with coconut)
Kegged: Cascade/Citra Amber Ale

oswiu

Recipes 

This has been one of my favourite threads on Homebrewtalk, and at long last I've finally gotten around to brewing my own GaP beer!

I used kumara (New Zealand sweet potato) for converting my starches. As MacBruver notes above, it does supposedly contain beta amylase. I've found some sources that say various varieties of sweet potato have a diastatic power of 150-300 lintner. I also found some sources that suggested that ginger root contains alpha amylase. These seemed a lot less certain, and give no indication of how MUCH, but I figured it was worth a try, and added some ginger to the mash too.

Since I might well have ended up with only beta amylase I did my best to include adjuncts that have relatively high quantities of unfermentables.

Here's the recipe:

9.5L batch
MASH INGREDIENTS
1.0kg Orange Kumara (chopped, frozen, thawed, then blended)
0.9kg Raw soft wheat
0.1kg Toasted raw wheat (toasted for 40 mins @ 185C in the oven. Came out looking a bit lighter than pale chocolate malt.)
0.02kg Ginger root

Mash for:
60 mins at 63C
40 mins slow ramp up to 69C
20 mins at 69C

BOIL INGREDIENTS
0.5kg Treacle @ 60 mins
50g orange peel @ 60 mins
20g orange peel @ 20 mins
5g cinnamon stick @ 5 mins

FERMENTING
Tasti Bread yeast @ 16-18C

OG=1.045

I mashed using a BIAB type method with only the solid ingredients included, leaving the treacle for addition at the start of the boil. The mash used 5L of water, then I did two "dunk" sparges with 3.5L, and one with 2L, giving about 12L into the kettle. Unsurprisingly, with a nothing but kumara and wheat in the mash, lautering wasn't easy.
The first runnings were nice and sweet, and a nice dark gold colour. Later runnings were an ugly green-brown colour. I took 1L of the first runnings and boiled it down to 500ml, hoping to caramelize some of the sugars.

The wort had lower gravity than I'd expected.
Part of this was because I mis-calculated the extract potential of kumara at first.
Part of it was because my efficiency was quite low (about 60%.) This may have been because I didn't let the mash rest long enough to fully convert, though I forgot to pick up some iodine before brewing, so I guess I'll never know.

That said, the kumara and/or ginger definitely DID convert starch to sugar. If I've (finally) got the math right, then the sugars in the ingredients alone should have given an OG of 1.012 or so. Since my OG was 1.045, a good chunk of the sugar in the wort must have been converted from starch.

The wort was pretty tasty. Nice dark brown colour. Quite sweet, with minimal bitterness. Soft, but clearly noticeable ginger and cinnamon flavours.

It's been fermenting away happily for a few days now, and I'm looking forward to trying this when it's ready

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Primary: Beast of Burden hoppy porter/black IPA
Secondary: Nothing
Bottle Conditioning: Nothing
Drinking: Buff Face Imperial Stout, Cria (2.X% ABV hop bomb), Llama Doodle NZ hopped IPA