What is the wildest brew you have brewed - or what is a 'Strange Brew' to you?

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Slatetank

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I was asked this by someone who was sampling my homebrew. I couldn't really say except the fact that I have mixed different styles, brewed historical beers and used unusual ingredients but for me all beer is unique in its way. I am curious if others have tried to answer this question and what the answer is.
 
The wildest brew is the one that comes from the brew session with no problems. Ponder that now!
 
Im gonna brew a lambic in the coming months, that should be tons of fun.
 
I have in the fermenter a Flander's red.
I did a variation on the Dogfish Head Midas Touch clone.
And I did a Porter using Pale, Amber, and Brown malt (no roasted malts)

All of them are pretty unusual. I havn't tried the Flanders yet obviously. The Grape Braggot is pretty good and quite different. The Porter was never worth drinking. The high percentage of brown malt left a dry grainy taste to the beer that was not very pleasant.

Craig
 
I made Charlie Pap's Goat Scrotum Ale about 12 years. I don't even remember what it tasted like.

When I first started brewing my friend and I made a bunch of crap. We were under the impression that every batch should have something crazy in it. We woul brew stuff like a blueberry ginger beer.

I still have our recipe book that we kept 12 years ago. For some reason we had to come up with stupid names.

For example

-Creamy Discharge Ale
-Fornication Red
-Lama Sack (Our version of Goat Scrotum)
-V.D. Wheat
-Biznich Brown Ale
-Smokin' $%#@ (An Ale with smoked barley)
-Stinky %^&*@# Wheat
-***** Slap Beer (our attempt at making something similiar to Busch)
-Pop Your Cherry Pale Ale
-Nut Fuzz Ale (Peach flavored ale)
-P.M.S. Red
-Menage' A $%^# (Three different extracts, three different steeping grains, three different hops
-Slutty Scottish Ale
-Blue Balls Hef (Blueberry Hef)

Flipping through the book we went through some strange phases. Everything was dated and during a few month long binge everything we brewed had some sort of wine flavoring extract in it. Someone told us back then that you could boost the ABV by adding belgian candy sugar. I noticed at one point everything we brewed had belgian candy sugar in it.

I remember a lot of crap we made was balanced and high in alcohol. We were 19, we were idiots, what can I say?

If anyone wants recipes for these gems let me know :D
 
I made a starter with Goya Malta and after it was finished it I bottled and primed it. I don't know if its strange, but it sure should be disgusting...
 
hah, that grocery and produce thread was kinda cool....i've actually done stuff like that. a few months ago, i made a pretty damn good brown ale from nothing but malta goya, malta polar, organic vanilla cola, organic root beer, brown sugar and bakers yeast.

as far as other strange beers......
for our one year anniversary, i made my girlfriend a batch of 14% a.b.v. winter warmer from 5 different types of DME, one pound of orange blossom honey, a box full of cherry flavored candy canes, cocoa powder, 15 different tea bags (assorted "Celestial Seasons" xmas teas), 2 oz of cascade hops, one vial each of White Labs "super high gravity" and "ten year anniversary belgian blend")

a few months back, me and my buddies made a belgian tripel....we used fresh hops (grown in my buddy Marcus' front yard), as well as a blend of 15 different fresh picked herbs that he collected from the woods near my house, 4 different types of honey, aloe vera extract, organic ginger ale, and fresh elderberries
 
I don't think it is too wild, but last year I made a beer with half of the grain bill consisting of two loaves of homemade Swedish rye bread. I actually just baked up some more bread this past weekend for a repeat brewing this coming weekend - in other words, it was quite good.

I'm planning a crazy experiment soon. I may prepare one of the ingredients at our upcoming holiday fondue party. I'll post about it, good or bad, when the beer is ready.
 
I kind of thought Mushroom brown ale was a bit unusual.;);)

I've made a morel and chanterelle porter. It actually came out rather amazing. There's a section in Radical Brewing about using mushrooms.

I made a rosemary wheat beer. It turned out about as good as it sounds.

I am going to be making prison wine, sort of on a dare. It is just going to be canned peaches, sugar, water, and yeast. I am pretty sure this will suck horribly.
 
Yeah I did a Chantrelle ale with Moortgaat yeast. I used all the leftover grain + extract I had and used homegrown hops from my friends hop harvest. I didn't think about the hops or yeast really, but I like the results. I would be interested in doing a Kvass possibly, but I don't usually drink my batches that quickly..so I would give away a lot - maybe a small batch
 
My weirdest brews have not been made yet. I have plans to make a beer that is going to use Pacific rainforest (spruce, salal , etc...) plants in the recipe. It's going to be a dark beer, possibly an imperial stout that is going to be at least 12+%.

I have a pretty good idea of how I want it to look and possibly taste, the roughest part will be doing the plant research and gathering what I need from the woods.
 
Harry's refried bean ale with extra vitamin F.

Yes indeed, I did a mash that included refried beans. Beano was involved as well. It was very small, only made 12 bottles. Two of which exploded, (surprise). I was just wondering if any starch could be broken down into a fermentable. I found that some can but just shouldn't. The flavor was just on the other side of awful. Now I try to stick to the more tried and true ingredients.
 
I haven't brewed anything crazy yet because I'm trying to get the 'brew something good' technique down pat first :) (my beer is good, in my totally unbiased opinion, but I'm no pro)

The strangest beer I've had, though, is probably the Rogue Chipotle Ale. When I saw it I had to buy it, but it was... weird. Spicy and smokey but didn't taste like beer because of it. I wound up chugging the glass before bed because I couldn't stand to dump it out.
 
One of my first batches, way back in a college dorm room, was a canned kit called Dogbolter. We took that and dumped about 2 lbs. of sugar in it, boiled it for about 10 minutes, fermented for 3 days with a quart of some dirt cheap whiskey, bottle conditioned for 3 days, and drank it all within 7 days of brewing. All we cared about back then was alcohol content. It certainly was rocket fuel.
 
for our one year anniversary, i made my girlfriend a batch of 14% a.b.v. winter warmer from 5 different types of DME, one pound of orange blossom honey, a box full of cherry flavored candy canes, cocoa powder, 15 different tea bags (assorted "Celestial Seasons" xmas teas), 2 oz of cascade hops, one vial each of White Labs "super high gravity" and "ten year anniversary belgian blend")

Okay I'm interested....how did it turn out?
 
Okay I'm interested....how did it turn out?

Believe it or not, it was ****in excellent.
a nice sipper, very warming, sweet, tasty, malty, a bit of a wine-like taste.
ages very well too.

i made it for our one year anniversary (1/26/07), we split a 750 of it on our second, and it was so good.
we each had a 12 ounce bottle of it on valentine's day this year too. even better.
she has a 12 ounce and a one liter bottle left.
we are very much looking forward to consuming the 12 ouncer and the last bottle of my double strength red ale from 2007 on our upcoming anniversary.

and i believe she wants to save the last one (the liter bottle) for our five year anniversary.
 
oh...and to further add to this thread, the other night, me and my buddy Joe made a doppelbock and we are gonna put prunes in the secondary fermentor.

it's called the crapinator (i know, i know, childish joke)
 
I made an "Experimental beer" based on a recipe from the book sacred and herbal healing beers. It was a "Purl" ale with no hops. Ingredients inclluded Calamus, Junniper berries, Galangel root, Gentian, Wormwood, horseraddish, dried orange peel. A rediish brown ale @ 9% and it came out Awesome! Very unique, probly a good alternative to traditional Christmas Ales.

Eastside
 
I did a Gruit, but I was unable to find some of the herbs at my local supplier like Gentain. It came out favorably, though with white pepper, yarrow, rosemary, juniper berries, mugwort, pau d'arco, russian sage, st johns wort, yerba mate etc.
 
I've got a gluten-free beer on the go that is made with quinoa, buckwheat, sorghum, syrup and has a 2L bottle of root beer added to the boil (and it's only an 8L batch). I can't say if it will be drinkable, but it sure will be interesting. OG was about 1.090 on this big boy, and I expect it to finish really dry.
 
Well, Strange is the brewery we went to last night! The most unusual brew I've done used wyeast 3278 lambic blend. It's got a long way to go before knowing how it turned out
 
I will be trying my Itchy ale on Monday. It is a wheat beer with an addition of sumac. I made 5 different addition amounts. We will try all five on Monday. If you don't hear from me by wednesday, you can worry!
 
I guess I'm not very crazy with my brewing. The weirdest things I've done is brew with wild yeast and brewed with a failed attempt to capture wild yeast. I tried to snag some yeast off a tomato from my parents' garden. I didn't get yeast, just bacteria that formed a white pellicle. When I opened up the jar a couple of weeks after inoculation it was the worst goat smell imaginable. I took that small amount of goaty wort and added it to a small batch of basic wheat ale during the boil. It smelled goaty all the way into the bottles. Once it carbonated it was actually very good. The caprytic fats that produced the goat smells were converted with alcohol into some very interesting esters. It had sort of a tropical fruit flavor and zero goat smell or flavor.
 
Necrothread.....Since I posted here 3 years ago, I've used, 50+ year old honey, Jaggery, Date Syrup, Date Palm mollasses, every grade of brown sugar, mascerated dates, mexican hot chocolate disks (both in the boil and as mash liquid), ginger orange marmalde, lime marmalade, candied ginger, tortilla chips, my own chili powder, whole dried and smoked chilli, I've roasted my own grain and even soaked it in simple syrup and then roasted it, I've been experimenting with priming with things like date syrup. I just did a brown ale where I mashed the grain with 2 boxes of ginger snap cookies... And I've used all the "normal" "strange" ingredients like pumpkin, spices, citrus peels, stuff like that.
 
hah, that grocery and produce thread was kinda cool....i've actually done stuff like that. a few months ago, i made a pretty damn good brown ale from nothing but malta goya, malta polar, organic vanilla cola, organic root beer, brown sugar and bakers yeast.

as far as other strange beers......
for our one year anniversary, i made my girlfriend a batch of 14% a.b.v. winter warmer from 5 different types of DME, one pound of orange blossom honey, a box full of cherry flavored candy canes, cocoa powder, 15 different tea bags (assorted "Celestial Seasons" xmas teas), 2 oz of cascade hops, one vial each of White Labs "super high gravity" and "ten year anniversary belgian blend")

a few months back, me and my buddies made a belgian tripel....we used fresh hops (grown in my buddy Marcus' front yard), as well as a blend of 15 different fresh picked herbs that he collected from the woods near my house, 4 different types of honey, aloe vera extract, organic ginger ale, and fresh elderberries


Were these any good? They sound crazy, but interesting!
 
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