Brewing Ingredients?

Just wondering what kind of "alternative" things you use or have used in brewing. Obviously besides the hops, yeast and malt, what else have you put in your boil or fermenter?

Mostly mistakes, like sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, honey, fruit, too much extract. It's the malt hops and yeast that make beer. A little honey is ok, and a little bit of extract maybe, but most other additions were mistakes.

I agree that the traditional ingredients are best for homebrewing, though I recently added about 0.5oz of crushed coriander to a wheat stout while it was in secondary, and I like the result. If you want to add an alternative ingredient, the key is to have the right amount of it. You want that flavor to be just hinted at, like you can't quite place it. Otherwise you stray from real beer flavor, which is okay, but probably not outstanding.

Thanks for the input, I'm brewing a Wit this weekend and it uses coriander (and bitter orange peel), so thats not a big surprise to me, although I'm supposed to add it to the boil...

My friend is brewing a "peanut butter porter" in which he used a hair dryer to remove a lot of the oil from the peanut butter first. I'm trying to hold off my judgement till after its finished...

Ok, part 2 of my post. What additives/clarifiers etc do you guys use religiously. I just used irish moss for the first time on my ipa...

I was an experimenter with cooking before I started brewing, and could never stick to a recipe. That carried over into my brewing. I've thrown a bunch of things in my brews, with only a few unhappy results. I make a smoked sweet bell pepper beer that I think is awesome. Try using the zest (just the green stuff, not the whole peel) of one or two limes in place of the orange zest. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

"non-traditional" ingredients I've used so far:

Sugars:
carmelized sucrose
turbinado
carmelized turbinado
date sugar
honey

Fruit:
wild plums
orange zest (variety of differnt types of oranges)
grapefruit zest
sour cherries
cranberries

Spices:
black pepper
coriander
chamomile


And I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface of potential possibilities...

Lyle's Golden Syrup. Tastes great in Orfy's Old Speckled Hen clone. I'm planning on using it in an upcoming ordinary bitter. Has anyone used Lyle's Treacle? I've a couple cans of that in the pantry and would love to know what kind of flavors it would add to an ale.