Athos710

Recipes 

I'll be brewing it up this weekend. Let me know how it looks for a 5 gallon batch. I'm going for some color and body to go with the high alcohol.

2 lbs Light DME
2 lbs Wheat DME
1 lb Crystal 90L
1 lb Vienna
1/2 lb Aromatic
3 oz Roasted Barley
2 oz Willamete Leaf (60 min)
5 lbs Honey (flameout)
WLP 007 Dry English Ale Yeast

avidhomebrewer

Recipes 

Your ratio of malt to honey looks about right. The recipe sounds tasty. Post your results.

mullenite

Recipes 

Sounds good, you can actually cool the wort quite a bit before adding the honey to protect some of the aroma.

It's very hard for anything to live in the honey and chances are it's been pasteurized anyway.

lumpher

Recipes 

looks like a decent honey ale. go for it

malkore

Recipes 

it looks like honey is 50% or more of your fermentables so its definitely a mead/braggot and not just a high-octane ale.

I've only made one braggot and I'm still on the fence about it. Came out too sweet, even though I did hop it a bit...apparently not enough for my tastes though. You've got more hop activity though so I think you're on a better path than my random experimental attempt.

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Malkore
Primary: English Mild
On tap: Pale Ale, Lancelot's Wheat, English Brown Ale, Steam Beer, HoovNuts IPA
Bottled: MOAM, Braggot, Raspberry Melomel, Merlot, Apfelwein, Pyment, Sweet mead, Cabernet
Gal in 2009: 27, Gal in 2010: 34, Gal in 2011: 13, Gal in 2012: 10

Athos710

Recipes 

It ended up being last August before I brewed this. The batch ending up being pretty interesting. I did 2 weeks in primary, and 2 months in secondary (I, uh... forgot about it). The color came out a nice amber ~12 SRM. I don't have the OG and FG on hand, but my notes say 7.9% ABV. The first few bottles I tried at the 3-4 month mark and each one tasted different. The first one had this incredible balance of flavors that I find hard to describe other than to say it was clear from the taste that this was no normal beer. The second one had a noticeable honey flavor to it and was noticeably sweeter than the first. I bottle carbed with corn sugar, no idea why the second bottle would have the strong honey flavor.

I took it to a HB club meeting in April '11, and the two mead guys both said it was a very nice balance, but they urged me to crank it up on the next go, 10%+ ABV. I thought it could benefit from some later hop additions, but they both said it wouldn't really fit the style. Being a hophead, I'll probably risk it since I don't see this going to a competition anytime soon

A friend took a bottle to a homebrew tasting event of ~40 non-beer geeks at our University's homecoming. It was the only braggot there, but he said it drew great reviews, and one of the other brewers asked me for the recipe. I'll be making another batch this winter, but using my new all grain setup instead of extracts.