Banana Bread Ale

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When I was getting my supplies for this batch, the LHBS owner told me about his "accidental" banana nut bread ale. He made a nut brown with some english liquid yeast. In putting it into his basement he accidentally knocked into his thermostat. It ended up at 85. He didn't know about it for a week until he went down to check on it. He figured he ruined it, but one of his friends tried it and said "wow! I make a banana nut bread that's just like this!"

Happy mistakes :)
 
Holy elephant farts batman!

This thing smells like a carton of rotten eggs. I've never had so much sulpher with a hefe yeast before, but then again i've never used whitelabs before. This normal?

EDIT= Found the answer in another thread. Thanks HBT!
 
MikeRLynch said:
Holy elephant farts batman!

This thing smells like a carton of rotten eggs. I've never had so much sulpher with a hefe yeast before, but then again i've never used whitelabs before. This normal?

EDIT= Found the answer in another thread. Thanks HBT!
Click to expand...


I made a german hefe with wlp300.....and I had the same problem. A horrendous smell! it was ridiculous! Stunk up the whole house for about 3 days just coming from the airlock. It even made the airlock water turn tan in color.:mad:

I used 3068 for this batch, and it does smell a little bit sulfury....but not even remotely as bad as wlp300......
 
DeathBrewer said:
cool.

as for the funk, i've had that with various yeasts, but this last time fermenting the bba, it was actually a pleasant banana the whole time!
Click to expand...

mine hasn't really smelled very bananaish.... I'm at day 5 in the fermenter.....and I took a small sample to taste, I really couldn't tell much banana if any at all. If anything it might have been slightly on the bitter side.
 
i did leave it covered..... I have a valve on my carboy that I can take a sample from without opening it.

btw....How many days should I leave it on the cake?
 
i'm leaving mine for 3 weeks and then straight to bottles. which means i bottle this weekend along with my SMaSH! yay!

i think i'll taste both tonight to make sure they weren't part of my bad water phase...if i'm going to send them out, they have to be good!
 
everywhere. this is a batch intended to send to a few people i missed on swaps, family i've been promising to send brew to, people at work, holidays, etc.
 
its been 11 days in the fermenter.....should I think about bottling around say, day 14?
 
but do you think it will be pretty tasty if I bottle around Day 14?

I'm wanting to fire up some more batches:D
 
Reviving this thread from the dead. My beer is bottled and carbed.

The stats:
- Started 12/6/08 OG 1.050. Bottled 1/25/09 (!) FG 1.013
- Too much trub got in the fermenter, had a hard time starting. Once it did though, it was done within 5 days.
- Got lazy and left it alone. Left it in primary almost 2 months. Trub was well compacted, but feared lysis of the yeast. Primed with nottingham and bottle conditioned for two weeks. Over carbed.

The verdict:

Pours very cloudy with a nice dark brown color, light doesn't travel through this one. The head was nice but dissipated quickly. The carbonation level is higher than I wanted it, it's actually quite spritzy.

Aroma is of subtle banana, some of that caramel sweetness comes through a bit. A little spice, but not much. No hop aroma to speak of.

A very sweet first sip, with a fair amount of tang from the wheat. The banana and toasted malts combined with the caramel is causing a strange flavor mix. Notes of brown sugar, some molasses, some tropical fruit, (banana mostly). It makes me think of belgians, but not any belgian I've had before. The finish is dry for such a wheat heavy beer, with a bit of bitterness playing with the wheat tang. Honestly I'd wonder if lower carbonation would make this beer too heavy and sweet. The carbonic acid is cutting through some of that sweetness. There is a tangy sweetness left on the palatte, but it goes away quickly.

I'm not sure what lysis tastes like, but I'm tempted to try this beer again and actually rack it on time to see what difference it makes. I've heard that autolysis can't occur for at least a month or two, so I think I was pushing it with this one. All in all, not a terrible beer (no infections or process flaws that I can detect, other than leaving it in primary too long). Unfortunately, not anywhere near a banana bread beer. I recently had an english ale (not hefe) that called itself a banana bread ale, and while it was certainly true to it's name, I could only have one. Interesting experiment, but I think I'll stick to the english styles for a while :)
 
Ok so does anyone have an extract version of this recipe for us new brewers not AG yet?
 
Not really...wouldn't quite work. You could do partial mash, tho. Check out the link in my sig and read the thread. There's a PM recipe in there, too.

MikeRLynch said:
Reviving this thread from the dead. My beer is bottled and carbed.

The stats:
- Started 12/6/08 OG 1.050. Bottled 1/25/09 (!) FG 1.013
- Too much trub got in the fermenter, had a hard time starting. Once it did though, it was done within 5 days.
- Got lazy and left it alone. Left it in primary almost 2 months. Trub was well compacted, but feared lysis of the yeast. Primed with nottingham and bottle conditioned for two weeks. Over carbed.

The verdict:

Pours very cloudy with a nice dark brown color, light doesn't travel through this one. The head was nice but dissipated quickly. The carbonation level is higher than I wanted it, it's actually quite spritzy.

Aroma is of subtle banana, some of that caramel sweetness comes through a bit. A little spice, but not much. No hop aroma to speak of.

A very sweet first sip, with a fair amount of tang from the wheat. The banana and toasted malts combined with the caramel is causing a strange flavor mix. Notes of brown sugar, some molasses, some tropical fruit, (banana mostly). It makes me think of belgians, but not any belgian I've had before. The finish is dry for such a wheat heavy beer, with a bit of bitterness playing with the wheat tang. Honestly I'd wonder if lower carbonation would make this beer too heavy and sweet. The carbonic acid is cutting through some of that sweetness. There is a tangy sweetness left on the palatte, but it goes away quickly.

I'm not sure what lysis tastes like, but I'm tempted to try this beer again and actually rack it on time to see what difference it makes. I've heard that autolysis can't occur for at least a month or two, so I think I was pushing it with this one. All in all, not a terrible beer (no infections or process flaws that I can detect, other than leaving it in primary too long). Unfortunately, not anywhere near a banana bread beer. I recently had an english ale (not hefe) that called itself a banana bread ale, and while it was certainly true to it's name, I could only have one. Interesting experiment, but I think I'll stick to the english styles for a while :)
Click to expand...

Sounds like it came up a little dry and the "breadiness" didn't come through. How long was it in primary? Honestly, I HIGHLY doubt that autolysis occurred.

Unfortunately, the batch that I made for this thread was one of the last of my water problems, so it went down the drain. I'll have to make another soon.
 
Hell yeah. I don't think I'll have time to brew this for a while...too many beers planned. But I'd like to fine-tune it at some point...see if I can perfectly replicate that "banana bread" aroma.
 
will be brewing a variation of this today or tomorrow.
I think I can get that aroma you were seeking... the plan will be revealed along with pics.

Now, the question is whether or not to break out the cooler and other AG gear or go stovetop AG? I'm thinking stovetop.
 
DeathBrewer said:
Stovetop will work fine for this beer. What the hell have you been up to? You haven't been insulting anyone in the tap room lately :D
Click to expand...

work work and more work -- also writing another screenplay in my off hours.

I did spend today cleaning the patio, procuring CO2 and propane then prepping the smoker for some pig and moo cow. Tomorrow is brew and smoker day. :tank:
 
BBA is boiling away. For reference purposes, I am using Deathbrewer's Stovetop method.

Here is the recipe I used - I added vanilla bean, dehydrated banana chips ( thank you SWMBO ), lost some grains and did the First Wort Hop shuffle with Santiam -- one of my favorite hybrid hops :rockin:

I'd do the No-Chill thing but my Cubes have not arrived.

____________________________


TAC's Banana Bread Ale Attempt.

6 lbs Wheat malt
3 lbs Munich
1 lbs. Flaked oats
.25 lbs. Carapils
.25 lbs. Crystal 60L

FWH with 1.25 oz Santiam Hops ( should give it a balanced sweet & spicy aroma ).
1 Vanilla Bean ( from my home-made vanilla extract Mason Jar ) added to Primary
1 oz Dehydrated Banana Chips added to primary.

Fermented on top of a Big Fat WLP300 cake from my last Hefeweizen batch. :ban:

______________________

It will be a little lighter in color than a traditional Dunkelweizen, but should taste incredible. A little sweeter with a malty, bready bite to it.
I didn't have the spare time to go to the LHBS to get the chocolate malt ( silly me, I thought I had a pound of it in the grain drawer ) ... so I used up my stockpiled wheat beer resources.
 
DeathBrewer said:
Good recipe. I think the vanilla bean will exemplify the "banana bread."
:mug:
Click to expand...

Thanks.
This thing started bubbling hard 45 minutes after it hit the yeast cake. :rockin:
The aroma from the blowoff bottle smells like a banana bread factory.

Yes. I am a sniffer. :ban:
 
thataintchicken said:
I wish I had a picture of SWMBO's face when she experienced a Dunkelweizen Krausen kicking in while in the condo :rockin:
She called me at work, saying my beer exploded into that little cider bottle with the tube in it.. is it supposed to do that? It smell yeasty , like bread.. is that good?


lol.
Click to expand...

Hahaha, win stuff
 
DeathBrewer said:
good idea. nutty will be ny next step, depending on how this tastes.
Click to expand...

mmm.. yes indeed. This just moved to the top of my "coming soon" brew list. I like the idea of nuts also (hehe) Maybe hazelnuts or pecans? and the vanilla bean sounds enticing as well. I've done vanilla beans before, but never nuts, any suggestion on how to utilize the nut flavors? Boil, Primary, Secondary? It's supposed to be a cloudy brew right, would a secondary detract from that?


Thanks, Looks great, can't wait to brew this one.
 
Just brewed this last night, smells great, is fermenting like crazy now, had to swap to a blow off as it was blowing out of the airlock when I got home
 
zman said:
What did you get as your FG?
Click to expand...

I just checked my partial mash version, after two weeks it is down to 1.015.

deathbrewer,

The banana aroma and flavor is very faint at this point. I fermented at 72 degrees. Should I have gone higher? (Still tastes like it is going to be a damn fine beer)
 
Not sure if this is gonna work out like I hoped. I brewed the same all grain recipe as you posted and pitched the vial of WLP300 yeast. It took about 30 hours for the lag phase after which it only took about another 30 hours to ferment. The aroma coming off the airlock was fruity, but not terribly bananay. I tasted it today (i know, bad me but I was curious) and i didn't really taste any banana. Fermented between 72 and 75 the whole time. Is the banana something i should have noticed by now? I feel like there may be some diacetyl (never tasted it before, but is that what makes it taste like band-aids?) Will patience pay off or should I try to maybe add some banana to the secondary? If so any recommendations as to how? Thanks for the help.
 
It may be faint, but will still be a damn fine beer. If there was a big lag phase and it struggled, you might actually get more fruitiness out of it. Let me know when it's done and how it worked out.
 
Ive, always wanted to do this recipe...especially for the holdays, but im too late!! The problem, was the getting the yeast, im going to have to order it online no one carries it. Im gonna just go ahead and make this ale, even though it will be partial mash.

I seriously, would give anything for one of those ales right about now!!

Deathbrewer, you mention possibilty of adding bannanas during ferment, why ? Does the yeast produce only a hint of bannana flavour ?

Why is this yeast so expensive 10$ a pack ? Does anyone propagate this type of yeast because, at that price, I cant buy it, and not propagate it ;)
 
Bottled it last week and just couldn't wait to taste, so I did. I was very concerned that this might be a completely botched batch (2nd attempt at all grain, 6th batch ever), but wow was I surprised.

I didn't get the strong banana I was hoping for, but it is there. I fermented at about 72-75 F and pitched straight a vial of WLP300 (30 hour lag).

My friend has been chomping at the bit to get me to release this beer, but I think i'm gonna hold onto it for another week or two, it can only help right?

I'm a little sad I didn't get the uberbanana I was hoping for, but its still awesome. Thanks Deathbrewer.

Oh, also, should this be poured like a hefeweizen (swirl the last 1/5 to get the settled yeast)?

Edit: Second note, like I said this is still only my 6th batch ever, so i'm still kind of a newbie. When I bought ingredients for the recipe i used straight ounce for ounce hops, then realized after that the alpha acids were way higher (almost 2x) on my bittering hops than yours. Does that mean that my beer is (approximately) twice the IBU of yours? If so in the future do I just do a straight ratio to get the same bitterness (in this case use 1/2 as much)? Thanks again.
 
Brewed a similar type this past weekend. I cut the Munic down to 2lbs and thew in 2lbs of Pale 2-row. I changed the hops to Hallertau, and added 1oz of Hazlenut extract in the primary.

More of an experimental beer, but it tasted great post boil, and the WL300 yeast took off within 24 hours. Keeping this around 70, so hopefully we'll get some banana flavors in there.

The color was faily dark, almost like a Dunkle. I'd figure this might be closer to a Hazelnut Dunkle than anything :)

Will let you know how it turns out with some pics.
 
I suppose you could do without. I don't know what I would replace it with...maybe some biscuit malt or brown malt.

I've never used bananas, but if I did I would mash them. That syrup looks like it might be tasty...I wonder how fermentable it is. It might leave the beer sweet if it doesn't ferment, but that could be good in small quantity.
 

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