Honey Lemon Rose Blonde Ale

Beer for swmbo, but I'm looking forward to it too. Our favorite flavor in the hookah is rose so I decided to make a beer for her off of that concept. I decided that a blonde ale with some honey flavor would make a good canvas for the rose and a little lemon citrus would accent it nicely:

OG 1.048
FG~1.009
~4.6% ABV

5.3 SRM

6lbs Pale Malt (US)
0.5lbs Crystal 10L
0.5lbs Honey malt
0.5lbs Flaked Wheat

Mash 152 F for 75 min

1oz Williamette 5.5% 60min = 20 IBU

US-05

zest of two lemons and 1 lb of orange blossom honey added to primary
*edit: deleting the lemon zest, and 2lb of clover honey was used instead of 1lb orange blossom*

?oz Rose Water added at bottling. I'm going to do some experimenting with an eye dropper and some light beer (maybe JW dundees honey brown) to get an approximation on how much rose water to use since the stuff varies in strength anyway. Thoughts? The recipe probably won't change since I already ordered the ingredients but I'm still interested to hear predictions.

Have you heard of a rhodomiel? It's a mead made with flowers of some sort. This sounds like it will have too many flavors going on.

Does she like beer already? The trick, I've found, to turning the opposite sex over to the dark side is to brew something without hops. They can't stand them for some reason.

ericd said:

Have you heard of a rhodomiel? It's a mead made with flowers of some sort. This sounds like it will have too many flavors going on.

Does she like beer already? The trick, I've found, to turning the opposite sex over to the dark side is to brew something without hops. They can't stand them for some reason.

Click to expand...

She likes a lot of beers but usually not hop-forward beers, so I figured a bittering addition of a more delicate hop would do well just to offset the sweetness. I am conscious of the possibility of too many flavors, but I'm hoping that won't be the case for two reasons: 1) only the rose flavor will be given a "leading role" and 2) I think the flavors will complement each other.

Ok, well, it sounds like you know what you want to do. I'd advise against putting too much rose in it though, or else it will be like drinking perfume. You use rose water in Indian food a lot, which I cook a lot of, and it's best when you know it's there but you can't really taste it. Like vanilla in brownies.

Holy wow. VERY interesting concept! I like your idea, it's well thought-out. I've never messed with "rose water" but what about making a rose liqueur with vodka? Just a far-out idea. I know it works well for other herbs/spices.

All in all a very nice concept! I might be tempted to leave the lemon peel out, and stick to just the honey and the rose... JWD Honey Brown might be a bit too malt-forward to give a good representation for the taste-test experiment... but it also might work very well! (JWD HB is one of my favorite "cheap" beers!)

I'll keep thinkin' about this. I like where you're going though! (And I'm SO trying Rose shishah sometime. Thanks for the tip.)

UPDATE: SWMBO and I were checking out our local mall for the first time and we wandered into a store called world market. It turned out to be a pretty cool store and had a small selection of beers that are tougher to find around here (corsendonk, and even hoegaarden is tough to find, some of the DFH's, etc). Among them is a beer called HONEY AMBER ROSE! "Malt beverage brewed with honey and rose hips and honey added[sic]" It says it's brewed by indian river beverage in melbourne fl for beautiful brews in boca raton fl. Very interesting! I'm fixing to brew my honey rose blonde tomorrow and I'm going to taste this one tonight.

I like the idea! I'll be very interested to hear how it turns out.

Any experience Ive had with rose hips (tea, chewing on them) has been more of a sharp tang. I like the idea of rose on the nose myself.

Seawolfe said:

I like the idea! I'll be very interested to hear how it turns out.

Any experience Ive had with rose hips (tea, chewing on them) has been more of a sharp tang. I like the idea of rose on the nose myself.

Click to expand...

Dry rose anyone? ...Great idea Coastarine

As it turns out, the rose beer that I bought is actually a sour beer. The rose hips aren't very detectable. The label mentions a woman in a few places. I'm thinking it's a little play on words with roselare...I dunno. No indication that this was going to be a sour beer but it's pretty tasty.

And, according to the website, a beer for women!

http://www.honeyamberose.com/welcome.html

Roses are good but use caution, I made a mead with rose and it was quite bitter. The honey is a must to balance that. I put the rose hips in the carboy with the mead directly and it turned the mead pink...

Coastarine said:

As it turns out, the rose beer that I bought is actually a sour beer. The rose hips aren't very detectable. The label mentions a woman in a few places. I'm thinking it's a little play on words with roselare...I dunno. No indication that this was going to be a sour beer but it's pretty tasty.

Click to expand...

I'm sure anyone who read this thought "wow, he must have been surprised" or something like that. Now imagine my surprise when I opened the second one today and it isn't a sour beer. Still kinda tasty, but a little watery. I'll give them a little credit though, they seemed to be shooting for a low calorie beer and considering it only has 108 calories I'm pretty impressed. Bud light has 107 by comparison. This is waaay better than a bud light.

My rose water came in the mail today and yes, this stuff is potent and probably bitter. Smells great though. I'm probably going to be measuring it in drops per 5gal batch. Estimate right now is about a drop per bottle.

In other news I added the honey to the 4 gallons of blonde ale by boiling 1 gallon of water for 10 mins, cooling to about 80F, dissolving a pound of clover honey in the water and added it to the fermenter about 24 hours after pitching (good 2" of krausen). The yeast immediately went APESH*T. I don't know if they were about to anyway, or it just seems worse since the volume is up to 5 gallons, or they're crazy for honey, or what, but 30 mins later the krausen was up the neck of the carboy and I put a blow off tube in. After about 24hrs of that it looked okay to switch back to the airlock, but when I got home from work just now the airlock is full of cloudy water and krausen was coming out of the top, so back to the tube. This has been crazy.

This beer has been in the bottle for 1 week now and I don't know how good it will be, but I included 8 drops of rose water each into 6 bottles of my witbier. It is barely detectable but it makes a really good witbier even better. I might make rose water the "secret ingredient" in my house wit.

It's good!

So far I think I like the honey blonde without the rose better than with the rose, although I have only had one with. On the other hand, I put rose into a six pack of my witbier and I think the flavor harmonizes better in that beer. I'm considering making rose water my "secret ingredient" in my witbier. You'd never be able to pick it out but it enhances the beer if you taste them side-by-side.

The experiment with rose water has been interesting and, because it is so bitter, has opened my eyes to the possibility of using the rose for bittering in a no-hop beer. That has potential to be a real swmbo killer.