Scotch bonnet and habeneros in beer

O, I promised a friend of mine who loves peppers that I would brew a beer with his scotch bonnet and habenero peppers, but I am unsure what the base beer should be.. Should I go with a nice malty stout, or a British bitter, or a session beer so that the peppers can really stand out.. Per haps I should just toss some pepper in the bottles and let them sit while the bottles condition.. Not sure if I want the peppers to be the star of the show or just background players.

Any suggestions? Has anyone here brewed with super hot peppers before?

I made a chipotle beer with an amber. ale as the base. Came out a little more brown than amber but I thought that worked well as a base. Be careful with hops a lot of bitterness will further accentuate the heat

The beer came out very spicy by the way and I ended up mostly using it for cooking or shock value. Great in chili

I have drank several beers with peppers and I am going to say a little goes a long long way. I drank a beer that had a serrnto chill in it and the beer was way too hot. You could taste the beer initally but then the heat just overpowered it. I

Chilis go great in most dark malty brews. Either a porter or a stout

I made a light ale chili beer with 1 oz Sterling hops (60 min) and 2 lbs roasted Hatch green chilies in the last 15 minutes of the boil turned out good.

A Pale Ale makes a good base for pepper beer. I have had (and liked) Rogue's chipotle ale which was a Pale.

really easy to overdo, especially with habaneros. i have a strong taste and tolerance for spice but even i don't enjoy a beer that tastes like liquid heat. you want something behind it - the flavors in crystal and brown malts back up nicely against the heat.

strambo said:

A Pale Ale makes a good base for pepper beer. I have had (and liked) Rogue's chipotle ale which was a Pale.

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Not a fan. Can't stand ballast point's pepper pale but love chipotle porters

A pale ale or blonde works well. I use a combination of fresh and roasted hatch chiles in a pale ale. Big chile flavor but no heat.

Yeah, some can be overly hot. I had a bottle of Twisted Pine Ghost Face Killah a couple weeks ago and it was amazingly hot, but still tasted great.

The few times I've made pepper beers, we were able to use a lot of peppers (mostly jalapeno with a little bell for a layer of flavors) by scraping all of the seeds and as much of the white membrane as possible. It gives more pepper flavor and less heat. Through them in the last 5 minutes and filtered before the fermenter. I've done pepper pale ales.

OK can someone give us a recipe that would work and not burn the taste buds off your tongue? I was thinking of maybe 1 fire roasted jalapeño per gallon into the fermenter?

I recently made a Habanero IPA.
I made a fairly standard batch of an American IPA, after I dry Hopped for 2 weeks, I split the batch in half and kegged it. I then took 2 fresh peppers, and diced them up a bit, soaked in about an oz of vodka overnight in the freezer (the idea was to rupture the cell walls while also letting the vodka kill any bad things) I then dumped it all into a sanitized hop bag, and dropped it in the keg including the vodka. After 48 hours i pulled it out, and the beer had a nice burn, but not over the top.
Next time, I think I would try it with a malty porter, add more peppers, but strip out the seeds and pith first to reduce the overall heat and promote the flavor.

hillybilly said:

OK can someone give us a recipe that would work and not burn the taste buds off your tongue? I was thinking of maybe 1 fire roasted jalapeño per gallon into the fermenter?

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https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f76/jalapeno-cream-ale-131294/

Last year I made a balanced amber ale with just a touch of aroma hops and some toasted malt. I added two large dried new mexico chiles to one gallon of it in secondary, and 2 smaller fresh grilled Jalapenos to a separate one gallon carboy. The new mexico chile version had a good chile flavor but very little if any heat. The jalapeno version had some heat, but the fresh green jalapeno flavor didn't add much to the beer.

As an experiment/challenge I added some dried ghost chiles to a few bottles to see what kind of heat would transfer to the beer. It turns out that most of the chile's heat transfers. Nobody that tried it could drink more than one sip, so I would recommend staying away from peppers you wouldn't actually eat.

The new mexico chile version was my favorite, but it wasn't something that I would rush to do again. I would try a darker style with chocolate flavors if I do a chile beer again.

I am about to brew a saison with hananeros and cilantro. I won't know until it is ready but I would think a saison would lend itself to peppers or other veggies.

Here's my recipe, SWMBO likes it hot, if you eliminate the "dry-peppering", you will cut a chunk of the heat out. I think before that step it had great pepper flavor and a bit of heat, I would eliminate them if brewing for myself only.

6 gallon batch (for a full keg after losses)
OG: 1.049, FG: 1.010

85% Two-row
10% Crystal 15L
5% Biscuit
Mash at 152 for 60 minutes or until conversion

60 min Simcoe 18 IBU
5 min Willamette 1.3 IBU
5 min Simcoe 3.5 IBU

5 min (5) green bell peppers
5 min (14) jalapeno peppers
Dry (0.25 oz) dried jalapeno pepper

WLP001 at 68 degrees.

As I said above, deseed and scrape all the membrane before use and you will get a lot more flavor without adding a lot of heat.

@sativen

I would suggest moving the 5 minute addition to flameout. My guess is that you'll be able to avoid much of that cooked pepper vegetalness by doing so. And I don't think the green bell peppers will bring much more (other than that off-putting cooked vegetal flavor) to the party.

Instead of "drypeppering" with dried jalapenos, try experimenting with some dried chipotle in small amounts. You'll get an interesting added smokiness.

I wonder if overloading on capsaicin will affect yeast health in any way. If that's the case, perhaps you should skip adding them to the kettle or primary at all... or at least take it easy.

@WIBeerGeek

Do you mainly want the heat from the habanero, or the flavors behind the heat? For a beer, I would much rather have those fruity, tropical notes vs. a vegetal spiciness.

If you want that sweet, complex, tropical habanero flavor, you could use Trinidad Perfume Peppers (not the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion or Trinidad Scorpion Butch). You could buy them in bulk, juice them, and then use the juice for flavor.

This specific variety tastes exactly like habaneros without all that heat. And there's a natural slight smokiness that is very minimal when raw, but more pronounced when cooked with dry heat, or grilled.

http://www.tomatogrowers.com/TRINIDAD-PERFUME/productinfo/9748/

Bob, I was hoping to get bot heat and flavor out of both peppers, the friend that I am brewing it for is known to eat scotch bonnet and habanero peppers whole off the vines.