Bochet Braggot experiment

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Arpolis

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Hello everyone

The other day I was getting some supplies together for a white grape peach wine and instead of picking up a pack of pectic enzyme I picked up amylase enzyme by mistake. My first thought was to attempt to return and exchange it but then I thought "well it must be fated that I got this so why not try my hand at a braggot". Searching the web there is absolutely NO recipes that use amylase enzyme on a grain to convert the carbs to sugars for your wort. Everything has you just using malts but I want to use the enzyme to convert some un-malted grains. Here is what I came up with for a recipe. Let me know what you think.


5 gallon Bochet style Braggot
3.3 # of LME Briess Sparkling Amber
.85# of apple cinnamon Quaker oats
.85# of cinnamon spice Quaker oats
1 TBS of amylase enzyme
4oz of cascade hops. (bittering and aroma)
5# of clover honey
1 cut up apple
1 stick of cinnamon
2.5 tsp of DAP
2.5 tsp of nutriferm advanced

Starter
2 cups warm water
1/2 cup of honey
2 100mg B6 tablets crushed
10 raisins chopped fine
Nottingham yeast

Now I have no beer experience at all so I am hoping I am getting things close. Here is how I plan to use the ingredients.

12 hours before making the wort/must mix all the starter ingredients and just sprinkle the yeast on top after much aeration. Cover with paper towel and rubber-band.

Mix all Quaker oats in large pot and add double the normal direction on the package for water. Bring to a boil and hold for 2 min.

Then make sure heat is at 150*F and add amylase enzyme. Hold temp for 1 hour.

At the same time bring the 5# of honey in another pot to boil with 1 cup of water. Boil the honey on a medium boil for the full hour the oats are going and then mix in 1/2 cup of water and let it rest.

Bring the oats to 170*F and hold for 10 min.

Sparge/ strain the sweet liqueur off the oats into the honey. Run 4 cups of hot water through the oats to get any additional sugars out.

Add 2oz of the cascade hops and bring to a low boil for 30 min. Then add in 1oz of hops and LME. Continue for 20 min. Add in the last 1oz of hops & stick of cinnamon for the last 10 min.

Put the pot into ice water bath and cool to room temp.

Strain off the hops but keep the cinnamon stick and add to the carboy along with DAP and top off with water. While incrementally adding water, shaking to mix and aerate. Add the apple that is chopped into 1/8 pieces and halved width wise.

Pitch yeast and attach blow off tube. 24 hours later add half the nutiferm advanced. 24 hours after that then add the rest. Let ferment as far as it will go and rack accordingly to clear.

I know the LME and caramelized honey will have some un-fermentable sugars but hope the gravity will drop below 1.02. which if estimated right will give an ABV of just over 6%-7%. My hopes is for a nice hoppy/malty mead with a hint of apple cinnamon in the back. Let me know what you think.
 
Man crickets abound lol.

I put this together last night. All went well but with a few slight changes. 1st I changed the oats to all apple cinnamon and added 24 packages. My pots are way too small so don't think I got the liquid amount right. I started the honey boil at the same time as the oat simmer with the amylase enzyme at 150*F. About 50 min past and I was not happy with the color of the honey so I added another 20 min to the original hour. That did the trick. Real nice caramel notes came from the honey and it was super dark. I then sparged the oats into the honey after adding three cups of water into the oats. Again too small of pots, the honey pot was mostly full. I added 6 more cups of water to the oats and second runnings went into another pot. I added the liquid malt to the second runnings and started my next boil. Hops all got added in as in the above recipe just fine. Real nice Caramel pine type smells in the kitchen now. I upped the apple to two apples in the must/wort and added a second cinnamon stick. The wort and honey oat mix reduced enough to all stick in one pot so I combined and chilled the pot in ice water till about 120*F and then added to carboy. Everything was mixed up with a good long shake and topped off with water. OG is at 1.07. My starter was pitched and this morning it is bubbling along nicely.

Here is a quick question. I was going to strain the hops off but since it was pellet hops and all mush it clogged up my metal strainer bad. I just added it all in the carboy becaus it was 1:00am and I was really tired. Was this a bad move? You think the braggot will be too bitter now? Or am I ok?
 
You'll be OK. You extracted all the bitterness out of the hops when you boiled them for the 60 minutes. Those other hop additions extract flavor and aroma.

As for leaving them you'll be fine for a while. The hop gunk will eventually settle to the bottom and when you rack to 2ndary or to bottle just be sure to leave that trub behind.

Also not sure what the oatmeal will add but I imagine it could add to the body of the braggot. I am curious about this one.
 
I only used the oatmeal because I needed an un-malted grain to use with my amylase enzyme I accidentally purchased. I like a beer with body and figured oats would have better body than corn/rice. And I did not want any weird carbs so the oats I get at SAMs in bulk made the most sence. Thanks for the vote of confidence on the hops. I thought I may have made a late night faux pas. I keep having to swirl to break the cap and release more CO2, it smells great. Still heavy on the hops aroma but I bet that's because it is all at the top right now.
 
A bit of an update on this bad boy. Looks like fermentation has stopped.My last Bochet ended at 1.03 gravity an I figured it to caramalized sugars not wanting to ferment. So I hoped this Braggot would have similar characteristics. It seems to have ended at 1.001. So That plus probably some sugar from the apples that were not saturated in the must at OG taking time, this is probably at about 9.5% ABV. Looks like the hops have settled. Yeast is still well suspended. When it clears more and is ready for first racking I will give it a taste test.
 
OK so here is the day I was waiting for! My Braggot is ready for racking lol. Been over two months since it's start and is still dark as night but I think as clear as this can get. The apples never settled to the bottom except for 1 or two slices but have all had their red color bleached from them. The gravity is still at about 1.000. It teetered between 1.000 - 1.005 so we are looking at a alcohol of no more than 9.5% ABV.

It had A LOT of Lees in the bottom of the carboy, like 2 - 2.5 inches of the stuff. So after racking I have a head space of about 3" from the neck. Think this will be ok for another month of bulk aging & letting final lees drop out?

I gave it a taste.... Now I am no expert at these things and so my opinion and thoughts are up for scrutiny. This was a very dark and bold tasting drink. Like a nice Guinness I would say. I don't know if I could really pick out the apple or cinnamon but if there it only helped to balance out the bitter from the hops. I LOVE IT! My favorite store beer is Guinness so this Braggot is right up my ally. For body it was not bad at all. Not super thick or cloying at all but not thin like a wine. I figured it may be weird still and would need to be carbed but this boy is great still.

Anyone else with a Braggot recipe try theirs recently?
 
This seems very interesting. I am trying to find a way to combine a mead and a stout and ended up here.

It seems like you made this like a beer, do you think it is possible to make it like a mead? Put toasted oats in a grain bag, combine with honey water and yeast and hope for the best?
 
Well I was trying to get some of the oats converted into sugars and break down the oats a bit. I had heard that oats used in that manor creates a creamy texture.

However the other day I cracked open a much simpler Bochet that only had some herbal tea cold steeped in it during primary and I force carbed a glass to try it. Oh my it was good. Had that creamy texture I was looking for. I tried that same Bochet months befor un-carbed and it was super sweet with only a little bitter from the herbs to off set & I was not too impressed. It is at a gravity of 1.03. I think I might try a Bochet again but not use the oats and cinnamon. Just the LME, apple and really light on the hops like 1/2 oz. I'll probably ferment it dry, back sweeten with an unfermentable sugar and bottle carb it.
 
I guess I didn't really answer your question. I bet you could make it more like a mead without the boiling of the grains and sparging. Probably just add the amylase enzyme strait to the must and just add grains in a muslin bag and steep it in the primary.

Now I am not a beer brewer at all and lack much info there but there is a purpose of boiling the hops in mash or LME. I just don't remember the exact reason. So when caramelizing the honey you can still add that like you do in beer but just skip the whole grain conversion part like in beer brewing.
 
Thanks for the help. I'll play around with this a little in January and see what slop I end up with.

I suppose this is something that would be better carbonated? I don't have the technology for that at the moment.
 
When I tried the above recipe I thought it was great still. The sweet herbal tea Bochet I made was not that great still but was really nice carbonated. I just think that if you want it still then it should be dryer than a gravity of 1.03 because the caramelized honey just gets cloying up at that point and then needs the carbonation to offset it. But thats my tastes. Yours may differ.

If you can not force carbonate, skip over to the Cider section of this site and there is a sticky on stove top pasturization that is insitefulll. Or you can ferment dry & back sweeten with lactose/splenda or just any unfermentable type of sugar finally using a priming calculator somewhere online and add the proper ammount of table sugar or dextrose that will yied the propper CO2 level in a sealed bottle.
 
Just an fyi, you don't need to use amylase enzyme on malt extract. Amylase enzymes are needed to produce sugar from the starch in grain, but this step has already been completed during the production of the extract. Using more enzymes on top of that will merely result in the loss of the residual starches and sugars that contribute to body and mouthfeel. This is why you ended at such a low gravity.
 
Just an fyi, you don't need to use amylase enzyme on malt extract. Amylase enzymes are needed to produce sugar from the starch in grain, but this step has already been completed during the production of the extract. Using more enzymes on top of that will merely result in the loss of the residual starches and sugars that contribute to body and mouthfeel. This is why you ended at such a low gravity.

What you say makes absolute sence and I do generally agree with it.

However in this instance I did not use the Amalyse with the Extract. I was using it with the un-malted oats so that I could convert some of the starch to sugar. Also I did bring the mash up to 170*F which should have killed off the amalyse so that it would not eat up all the starch in the must/wort.
 
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