Yarrow grows everywhere in eastern washington and I am planning on using it in a beer as a bittering substitute or supplement. I recently harvested and dried about a sandwich bag full of the flowering heads.
********WARNING 1: Yarrow flowers look very similar to those of the water hemlock, which leads to a quick but really violent death involving seizures and asphyxiation. Know the difference if you plan on harvesting wild. The way I tell yarrow apart is its feathery leaves and its absence of pistons/stamens on the flowers. Yarrow flowers also has a minty smell when crushed between the fingers while I am told that water hemlock has a carroty smell. I also made sure to harvest away from creeks and the like where water hemlock prefers. That said, it's easy to tell them apart if you've seen em both and checked each time you moved to a new plant.
Water hemlock:
Cicuta douglasii - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yarrow:
Achillea millefolium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
********WARNING 2: Yarrow flowers can produce an allergic reaction that involves a severe skin rash (?!). I am not sure whether boiling affects this, but I imagine passing it to a friend without first checking to see if they are allergic to the plant could be bad.
Okay, just wanted to make sure everyone who is interested read that part first. Now for the cool stuff.
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I plan on doing three one gallon batches with different additions. I took some first impressions of the herb by tasting old and young flowers, fresh and dried. The flavor has a pronounced minty and medicinal taste reminiscent of vick's vap-o-rub. The bitterness is more like a dandelion than a hop. The only difference between the old and young flowers my palate could detect was more grassy flavor with a sharper bitterness in the younger flowers and more floral flavor with more pronounced dandelion characteristic from the older flowers. I'll experiment with this more later, but for now I'm just mixing them. I'd like to see if I can get the minty flavors or the bittering qualities.
HOW MUCH: This varies quite a bit depending on the recipe, ranging from as much two ounces every gallon (?!) to one ounce every five gallons. I would like to carry on the work where this homebrewer left off in an older thread on
http://brewersround table.com/experimenting-with-yarrow-t609.html, which puts me at around 1 to 2 ounces for every 5 gallons. You have to delete the space in the link because HBT has disabled links to that site. Whatever.
1 oz @ 60 minutes
1 oz @ 60, .5 oz @ 30
1 oz @ 60, .5 oz @ 30, .5 oz @ 15
WHAT STYLE: Up to you, of course. I'd like to reference the above thread again to back me up on this, but I thought I'd try it in a porter or even a stout or a mild. The other option was to use papazian's base for his goat scrotum ale, maybe throw in some brewer's licorice.
It's late, so I'll revisit this tomorrow...hopefully with a recipe.
The Yarrow Thread, for the curious
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