addition of honey to Brown Ale

saludaranger · 05-17-2008, 10:45 PM

I have a recipe for Brown Ale from a Liquid hobby ingredient kit. it calls for:
3.3 lb Dark Malt Extract
1 bag of dry malt extract
malto dextrin
1 oz hops
1 packet of yeast
5 oz priming sugar

Can i add 2 lbs of honey to the wort after the boil (no longer on heat) to create a honey brown ale?
It seems reasonable to me. Comments? Questions? Concerns?

thanks for all advice.

Saluda Ranger

leghorn · 05-17-2008, 11:56 PM

I see lots of debate on the need to pastuerize honey or not. Let me tell you what works for me. I heat the honey on the stove in an oven-proof sauce pan to about 180 degrees. Then I move that saucepan to the pre-heated 180 degree oven for 2.5 hours. I time this so that I can do it while I boil the wort, and drop the honey into the cooling wort. Seems to work for me. Honey will add fermentable sugars and subtle flavor, but the flavor may boil off if added to boiling wort.

As for the 2 pounds, it's hard to say without knowing the total batch volume and lbs for the dry malt extract and malto dextrin. Can you post more info?

**RichBrewer** · 05-18-2008, 12:20 AM

It looks like your OG would be about 1.041 this is assuming the one bag of DME contained 2 pounds of malt and it is a 5 gallon batch. If you add the 2 pounds of honey it will bring your gravity up to about 1.056. The honey will make your beer quite a bit more alcoholic and also make it thinner believe it or not.

saludaranger · 05-18-2008, 01:41 AM

Thanks very much for the info. I am a backyard beekeeper and am excited about adding my own honey to the mix. I will add the honey after the temp of the wort comes down a bit around 150 i guess. I don't want to damage the honey. I think i will experiment with 1 pound this batch. PS I am making 5 gallons. I am unsure of the exact amount of malto dextrin and dry malt extract since it is prepackaged as a kit...
I will let you know how it goes friends... thanks again for the advice.

HOOTER · 05-18-2008, 04:31 AM

I've never used honey before and am completely unfamiliar with it as far as brewing is concerned, but I've heard that honey really only increases the ABV of the beer, along with some dryness, but doesn't have much of an affect on the flavor. Maybe someone who's used it can comment on this.

count barleywine · 05-18-2008, 09:26 PM

From experience honey will thin out the beer some, boost alcohol and will drag out the end of the fermentation. The flavor of fermented honey is very different than unfermented, white wine-ish like mead. I've never had a flavor problem using honey, but I don't really use it anymore. I just use cane or corn sugar to thin beers or help reach my target FG.

saludaranger · 05-19-2008, 12:27 AM

Excellent. My partner in crime and I decided to just use 1 pound of orange blossom honey in our brown ale. We will see what the end result is. I will post whatever happens.

saludaranger · 06-29-2008, 06:59 PM

The honey seemed to take forever to break down and ferment. We bottled up after 3 weeks of fermenting. We have recently tried the beer and found it to have an almost white wine / mead-ish like taste... We were told by some knowledgeable brewers that it could be the yeast - and that the beer had not fully fermented... meaning we bottled to early.
We are letting the beer sit for a few more weeks before we open up the next round of bottles. It was a great learning experience for sure.

I think next time I will leave the honey out.

J
http://thesaludaranger.wordpress.com/

Shawn Hargreaves · 06-29-2008, 07:46 PM

I've made a couple of brews with honey: an amber ale with 1lb clover honey, and a brown ale with 3lb orange blossom honey. Both turned out very well (in fact the second was my favorite brew so far) but neither really tasted of honey. It produced a light but high alcohol beer without the weird taste I got the one time I tried using sugar.

I didn't have any problems with the fermentation time, but I've heard this can be a problem. I added some yeast nutrient to my 3lb honey brew, which apparently can help things ferment more quickly. Honey alone doesn't have all the nutrients necessary for healthy yeast, so if you have a high honey/malt ratio, manually adding some more nutrients can help keep things moving.

**Brew-boy** · 06-29-2008, 08:16 PM

I also did a brown ale with 2lbs of Honey at flame out and I cannot taste any honey at all. The beer turned out fine but just a little to dry for me.