Yeongji Mushroom and Dandelion smoked ale

So here's my experiment with Yeongji mushroom.

Some background--I live in South Korea, and Yeongji mushrooms(reishi in japanese) are popular for tea. It's refreshingly bitter and earthy. Recently we've run out of nugget hops over here, so I decided to give this a try. Dandelions and tettnang were thrown in because I wanted a "foresty" feel to the beer--earthy, smoky, flowery.

I was pretty happy with the wort--if it weren't so cloudy it'd have actually made a really tasty "tea". Sweet with a really, really earthy bitterness. If this turns out, we might have a nice substitute for nugget hops on this side of the world.

Yeongji--Dandelion Smoked Ale

Steeping—
1kg: smoked malt
500g: carapils malt
1 yeongji mushroom: for this part, prepare the yeongji a day or two before. Break the cap into pieces and lightly boil it in a gallon of water for 2 hours (covered pot). Pour the tea and mushroom pieces into a mason jar and put it in the fridge. Remove the mushroom pieces from the tea and put them in the steeping wort. Drink the tea or pour it out.

Boil—
60min
2.5kg: dme light (although, in retrospect, beerschool may have accidently sent me 2kgs).
28g: cascade hops
1.5 tblsp: irish moss

15mins
14g: tettnanger hops

8mins
Take a hop/grain bag and place dried dandelion flowers in it—roughly two fistfuls of dandelions (two cups?)—and place into wort

5 mins
In the same grain/hop bag as the dandelions, put in the other 14g of tettnanger hops
5 gallon OG: 1.054

Hey nice to see the recipe in full swing. Definitely post back!

I'm either impressed or horrified, depending on how it turns out!

So this was in primary for a week, and I got a taste of it after putting it into secondary...it's not bad, not bad at all.

I'm shocked and frightened by how balanced it is honestly.

Right now the dandelions are a tad overpowered, but hopefully secondary will sort that out. Overall it's smokey, mildly bitter, woody from the mushroom, flowery, and citrusy. Hmm. Can't wait till carbonation

Good job, jdog! I love seeing these innovative approaches. Make sure you post back once it's ready for drinking.

Hey guys,

It's out of secondary and it tastes quite good. The dandelion is indeed overpowering, but nothing that's off-putting. I can taste the yeongji mushroom in the back of my mouth--bitter and woody--it's quite nice.

However, blargh, I bottled with corn *syrup*, and that's introduced a sweetness that I'm not liking...that, OR, I used too much carapils. Either way, there's a lot of unprocessed sugar coming in from some source.

So, with some tweaking this could be pretty amazing and not just "interesting".

I'm glad it turned out!

Now you have an excuse to make a bunch more to fine tune