Black Pepper/Ginger brew, thoughts?

Alright party people,
I want to do a black pepper/ginger partial mash brew. Not really sure where to begin. I really need thoughts on a base beer and the appropriate hops to go along with it. I dont want to mask these flavors but also don't want them totally in your face. Curious to see what all of you think!

Maybe in a belgian wit? I used whole peppercorns in secondary on a belgian tripel and it was delicious.

a wit would be nice. I'll probably go with a wit or a double. Hop suggestions?

Made a Wasabi Ginger ale. used 3 oz @ 30min, 1 oz @ 10 min, and 1oz @ secondary. Turned out to have a nice ginger aroma and a slight flavor, but nothing overpowering. Just add the black peppercorns like forsmeiter suggested.

I like Glacier for my ginger beers, which are pretty light. I like a BU:GU ratio of >0.4 so some malt sweetness remains. So I might put 1/2oz at 60 and 1/2oz at 10. I like your idea of pairing ginger and black pepper - or maybe grains of paradise!

So I went with a French saison smack pack and my local hbs saison kit with specialty grains. Added two tbsp of crushed peppercorn and 1/4 oz of dried ginger. Smells great! Should be able to transfer to secondary on Thursday!

I was getting ready to vote for a saison before I got to the bottom of the thread and saw you'd already done it. I made a saison with pepper, ginger, orange peel, and mint leaves a while back which is still one of my favorites.

dearestxapollo how did it turnout?

bdh could I get that saison recipe? Sounds amazing!

Curious as to how this turned out too. Also, how did you arrive on black pepper, wouldn't be my first thought if I wanted to ad pepper to a beer.

raenester said:

bdh could I get that saison recipe? Sounds amazing!

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I think I used this recipe from hopville as the base (which already has ginger and orange peel):
http://hopville.com/recipe/711939

Then I added about 10-12 lightly crushed peppercorns at flameout. For the mint I added 3oz of whole mint leaves after primary fermentation had finished and let them sit for about a week.

This gave the beer a lot of mint flavor/aroma, which was very polarizing. Most people loved it, but some found it overpowering. If you want a more subtle mint I might cut this down to 1 or 2oz.

It came out very nice. We added some ginger root with the speciality grains and maybe a tablespoon of crushed peppercorn in the last 15min. After primary was done, the ginger wasn't really there so we added 3 chunks of crystallized ginger for secondary. Nice ginger bite upfront and some warming of pepper at the finish. Kegged it up and is pouring so nice. Thanks for all the help people!