Expert advice needed!

Hello everyone!

Our latest brew of amber beer has been fermenting perfectly for quite a while now, and will soon be ready to go to secondary. As mentioned in earlyer threads, we've split our batch in 3. A large 30L bucket (22L filled, just to make amber beer), and 2 smaller fermenting bottles (4L each, for experiments). We've decided to try to make chili/citrus beer in 1 of the bottles, and banana beer in the other. So after racking to secondary we will add the special ingredients. This is what we're planning to do:

Citrus/chili beer: We will grate the skin of 4 lemons and 2 limes, chop up some home grown spicey peppers (Not too many because they are DEADLY hot), put them in a small pan, add just a little bit of sugar and boil it all in the lemon/lime juice for quite a while. Then we will let it cool down and sieve it. We will add the fluid to our secondary and add a few whole (sanitized by boiling) peppers.

Banana beer: We couldn't really find a lot of info about banana beer, only bananabread beer but we figured that's not the same. We don't have any banana extract so we are planning to just get as much juice as possible out of 7 ripe bananas , boil it, cool it, and add it to the secondary.

As this are just two made up recipes, we'de like as many opinions and advices as possible. We don't mind taking some risks, as they are just experiments, but if you guys notice things that just sounds stupid, we'd like to know! Also ofcourse, if you have other ideas that are much better than ours, we'de love to hear all about them.

Thanks in advance, we're hoping to get some good feedback!

Check out certain yeast strains for the banana flavors!

Are you going for an over the top banana flavor, or just a hint? It's too late now, but next time you may want to think about fermenting it with a belgian yeast strain. There's a few of them that, when fermented at higher temps, will give you a really nice banana flavor.

Suthrncomfrt1884 said:

Are you going for an over the top banana flavor, or just a hint? It's too late now, but next time you may want to think about fermenting it with a belgian yeast strain. There's a few of them that, when fermented at higher temps, will give you a really nice banana flavor.

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We're not sure to be honest, probably just a hint of flavor. Thanks for the yeast idea, we will try that some time! Also, how do you think our chili/citrus recipe looks. Could it turn out well?

We have a guy in our club that put 10 jalapenos into the boil for his "famous" jalapeno pale ale. Depends on just how hot your peppers are, but I think you're on the right track for a citrus/pepper beer. Have to say I'm not a fan of the Jalapeno beer, but maybe the citrus would help balance it?

Good luck with it and keep us posted on how it turns out.

Tomerwt said:

We're not sure to be honest, probably just a hint of flavor. Thanks for the yeast idea, we will try that some time! Also, how do you think our chili/citrus recipe looks. Could it turn out well?

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Honestly, I don't think it's going to turn out like you're hoping. Citrus does help bring out the flavor of other things, but you won't be able to taste the lemon/lime over the peppers. I could be wrong though. That's what homebrewing is all about....experimenting and finding new ideas.

Thanks for your responses, we will rack to secondary and add the ingrediënts tomorow! The gravity reads 1.015 atm, so we'll give it another 1 or 2 weeks to get to 1.010 and then we'll bottle. Ofcourse we will post a review on how they turned out

We do still have 2 questions:
1. The amber ale kit had a picture of what the end product should look like, it shows a very dark brown beer, but our brew has a very light brown, even a bit clear appearance. Will the beer become darker when aging? Did we do something wrong? Or isn't the picture in the beer kit reliable? (We must say, it doesn't seem like we did something wrong, because we had a little sip from the thief after gravity-testing and it already tasted really good)
2. Our chili/citrus recipe contains some sugar, will this sugar also cause fermentation, or doesn't it work that way? (We don't know how to formulate this question so we hope you guys get what we mean)

Cheers!