From Inspiration to an experimental brew

well I was reading a thread on an "8 dollar bush beer" and one of the ingredients calls for tea and I was thinking why not make some tea beer myself. I am heading to the grocery store today as well as my local brew shop to pick up the ingredients so let me know what you guys think about it.

for 5 gallons of wort:

24 sun tea or dark tea bags
.75 oz of maybe centennial,simcoe, cascade or nugget hops
2lbs of brown sugar
? oz of rose hips
I can of wheat, malt extract
oh yes and and ale yeast whatever is avalible at my local brewshop

boil 2 1/2 gallons of water down to 1 1/4. first add the hops, rose hips and sugar for bittering and boil for ten minutes then the tea so you don't destroy flavor of the tea and boil for another for another 15 minutes. Then add to the Primary with 2.75 Gallons of water and let it ride.

Please comment and don't hesitate to criticize CONSTRUCTIVELY!

Okay, interesting idea... but no grain (or grain extract) and no yeast. How is this beer, and not just a large batch of interesting (and potentially tasty) hoppy sweet tea?

oh sorry totally forgot about the yeast haha Im still not sure weather to go with a turbo high abv tolerating yeast to get it up to a abv around 20% or just use a regular ale yeast. or what hop strain to use, but I guess Ill figure it out soon. I also may use a malt extract but am unsure what to use. I will post full real recipe and procedure tonight when I brew it!

I would make this as normal tea: Boil water (add hops as for a beer, at same intervals) then add tea AFTER the boil. Steep for 5-10 minutes, press bags, then stir in sugar, cool, pitch.

Also, take gravity reading after steeping tea and adding sugar. Will want to know what ABV is when it finishes.

Cool thanks for the input I also bought a wheat malt extract, Im still wondering if I should use it or not or only use half also if I do add malt extract how much brown sugar would be sufficient. I may end up using none at all or wait to use it for my primer. My main concern being weather or not I should use all the malt or if I should only use half a can to leave room in the flavor for the tea. I also just purchased ale yeast and Amarillo hops. I will be going to get the tea later tonight and the brown sugar.

I think you should check out the Kombucha threads for some advice. I don't have any experience with fermented tea but that's all this is. Without any grain, it's not going to be a "beer". Not saying that is a bad thing though.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f167/

With 2 lbs of sugar in 3 gallons of wort, that's going to give you about 2.4% ABV I don't see any other fermentables in the ingredient list other than the sugar (could be wrong though).

I dunno... again... I don't have any experience with Kombucha but it kinda sounds like tea flavored hooch. It won't be sweet at all (I don't think) since the sugar will ferment out completely.

As far as turbo yeast... Unless there is a typo and that "2lbs" is supposed to be "21 lbs" or something... like I said, this is going to be about 2.5% ABV so I don't see how Turbo yeast would be needed.

well i did get the malt extract so i will be using that and plan on adding the sugar after the boil to keep some sweetness hopefully and i went with regular dry ale yeast

scarfaceshim said:

and plan on adding the sugar after the boil to keep some sweetness

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My head hurts trying to figure that out.

scarfaceshim said:

plan on adding the sugar after the boil to keep some sweetness

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Yeast eat sugar...

I am dying to know how this turns out. Please keep us informed. Maybe a video of the tasting? Also, can you post the starting gravity? You need alot more fermentable sugar to hit %20 ABV.

Wait, does it say you will boil .5 gallons down to 1.25 gallons?

I'm wondering though if he underpitches and does a shorter fermentation if there will be any residual sweetness in the beer? A low attenuation should leave some sugars, no?

tre9er said:

I'm wondering though if he underpitches and does a shorter fermentation if there will be any residual sweetness in the beer? A low attenuation should leave some sugars, no?

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I am still lost on the whole 20% ABV with two lbs of sugar...

but...

You basically need to add complex sugars that aren't fermentable. That's really the only way to leave some residual sweetness unless you kill off the yeast before fermentation is complete through pasteurization or something.

When using just plain sugar and pitching, even underpitching, the yeast will eat every bit of it until the ABV or other toxins given off by the yeast kills the yeast off. That point varies from yeast to yeast and even batch to batch so it is very difficult to know exactly when your yeast will crap out. All underpitching will do is stress the yeast out and cause off flavors. (green apple, pumpkin, etc)

As I was saying before, folks who brew all-grain leave a little residual sweetness by mashing in the higher end of the Sach rest... that'll convert the grain starches into reasonably complex sugars and the chances are pretty solid that it'll be a bit sweet.

That's not the case here though... even with malt extract, the yeast will dry it out. Perhaps some maltose would do the trick.

I think we have to wait and see what the actual recipe is going to look like first.

So I did not end up doing my boil Last night since I did not have much time and did not want to rush it. Also I feel I need to clarify a little bit on what I am doing.

First i'm going to boil a large initial wort with the extract so I have the potential to get as much hop and tea flavor as possible. Next I am only using an ale yeast. I trashed the idea of using a turbo yeast with a lot of sugar.

Also I promise I will post the gravities and all my procedures and recipe, The only reason this is so helter skelter is because I'm developing this idea as I go along. This is just a fun experiment for me and I feel that the flavor of the tea will meld well with the flavor of the beer

Finally I am still not sure what I am doing with my brown sugar since I do not know if it will work as a good primer or not or if I should just put the 2lbs I got into the primary to give it a good abv. Also does anyone know If I added the 2lbs of brown sugar with the malt initially if it will all ferment out or if the yeast will die before it could ferment all of it?

I promise to post pictures, procedures, recipe and OG soon!

also I am new to brewing and if you have any ideas for procedures it will be greatly appreciated.

I would also like to note I am continually changing the recipe at the top of the post as I find more information until I am at my final recipe.

tre9er said:

I'm wondering though if he underpitches and does a shorter fermentation if there will be any residual sweetness in the beer? A low attenuation should leave some sugars, no?

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Thats what I was thinking, but was worried that it may just ferment longer instead. I also want to get a high enough abv where I will be able to keep the beer for a while. nothing crazy obviously but at least 5%

Really quick back of the envelope...

if you did 4 lbs of light DME and another 2 lbs of dark brown sugar, you would end up with somewhere between 8.75% and 9.00% ABV for 3 gallons of wort.

There's no reason to do a boil any longer than an hour. AFter that, you're not extracting materially any more oils from the hops so it is a bit of a waste. I can't imagine you would be pulling any more out of the tea either so there isn't any need to boil longer.

In terms of residual sweetness... if you pitch a basic ale yeast (say... US-05), the US-05 will eat just about every bit of sugar in it and there is no way to stop it unless you take constant hydrometer readings and then pasteurize it or something before it is finished (I would advise against that).

You could add some maltodextrine and that might give you some residual sweetness... a half a pound would goose your ABV up to around 9.5%.

For the tea... like I said before, I've never done anything with tea but I would advise against boiling the tea. I would think you would pull all sorts of tannins out of the tea leaves. I would steep a ton of tea like you were making a huge pot of tea, and then add that to the boil about five minutes before the boil is over.

For hops... Centennial is heavy on citrus so that might be a good combination with tea.

Now... all of that said... I have no idea if any of that would actually be drinkable.

I think what I may do is brew with the LME that I bought and brew the tea seperately and add both to the primary. Then just add the brown sugar in when priming and just cut the aging time short. (about 2 1/2 weeks) and just leave it in the fridge for 2 to let everything settle out

So here is the recipe and procedures from when I did the boil tonight.

1oz Amarillo hops
1 can or 3.3 lbs of wheat LME
20 lipton tea bags
2lbs brown sugar
1 package US-05 ale yeast

First I boiled .5 gallons of water for the tea. once it was boiling, I removed the pot from the heat and put the 20 tea bags in the pot and let it steep for 3 minutes. I then removed the bags and set the pot aside with the lid on.

I then boiled 1.5 gallons and proceeded to treat it as any other boil. I added the LME, and hops and boiled for 40 minutes. At the 40 minutes mark I added the tea to the boil. I then boiled for another five minutes. I then removed the pot from the heat and slowly stirred in the brown sugar until it was disolved and gave the wort an ice bath.
I then added the wort to my primary as well as 3 gallons of fresh water.

I took my OG and it was at 1.040. I tasted it and the tea flavor seems like it will work with it!. So well see what happens in a few weeks

Nice, keep us posted.

So I left it in the primary for 2 weeks and during conditoning added 2oz of cenntenial hops. I bottled last thursday and read the gravity at 1.010. I tried the mash and for an extract it has a nice bitter taste. also the tea flavor is kinda subtle, but not nonexistant. the aroma and taste from the dry hops is good as well. If someone is to try this recipe I would sugest adding a bit more tea, but we will see how it really turns out in 4 weeks.