Spicy Beer?

So this may be counter intuitive, but I grow peppers (preppers as my buddy Steve calls them) and I always have a ton leftover, so I dry them and make a ground mixture for the rest of the year. I've been curious to see what would come out if I brewed with it. Anyone try making spicy beer before? It sounds pretty gross.

 

I have tried a few pepper beers and if done right they are awesome.
I have an Imperial orange, chocolate, habanero recipe drawn up I am hoping to brew by mid summer.

In the recipe section there are a few posted in various sections of it but it tends to be more common in Porters and Stouts.

 

Great! thanks for the tip. I was thinking chocolate for sure. I was going for like a Mexican mole type of porter or something. Ok I'm encouraged, I'm going for it after my habaneros are ripe.

 

Two local breweries here in NH, Portsmouth Brewery and I believe Throwback Brewery, did a collaboration for Portsmouth Beer Week which was a take on a Mexican Mole. It was really good. One piece of advice that I have read about the subject is that a little goes a long way, especially using habaneros. The general consensus is to add the peppers post fermentation in your secondary and many do so making a vodka and pepper tincture to dump into the secondary.

There are a good amount of recipes floating around out there...good luck!

 

A habanero cider made by a member of my local brew club was my inspiration to add several varieties of peppers to my garden this year. I can't wait to experiment! I'll be doing primarily pale ales and IPAs for this adventure.

 

Personally, I would stick to brewing with fresh peppers, and using them in secondary. That's just me, though, because I just love the taste of fresh peppers.

 

The best method I've seen is "soaking" cut peppers in vodka for a couple weeks then using the resulting liquid into bottling bucket (or shortly in a secondary). This way you can add a drop at a time into a finished beer similar to the one you're making to test the heat level. Do the calculations once you find the sweet spot to see how much to add to batch quantity. There is such a big variance in heat level from pepper to pepper, it is kinda a crap shoot to simply add __# of peppers to a secondary. So far I've made a habanero pale ale, and a jalapeno IPA. Both were excellent! BTW - In each batch I individually juiced 2 bottles per batch with about 5 times the amount of tonic, no markings........beer roulette!

 

I had a really good molé beer once: peppers and coco nibs.

 

A little goes a long way.

I've got 5 gallons of smoked porter split 5 ways with 4 different peppers, the last gallon being 4 (used jalapeno, serrano, habanero, and bhut jolokia). Even with jalapenos it's easy to overdo the heat. With stronger peppers it doesn't take much to throw the thing way out of balance and lose the base beer behind the peppers. My combo batch someone called capsaicin oil.

 

Elevator brewing in columbus Ohio brews a beer with ghost chili peppers and a scorpion pepper called ghost scorpion. Having a shot of it was enough for me. My friend liked it a lot though...he's insane

 

I did an Orange Honey Habanero Wit last year that everyone really loved. Doing it again in a few weeks. Dang, I have a lot of beers to get brewed ASAP.

 

Habanero IPA turned out real good. Kept the bitterness on the low end because it would have been overwhelming with the back end heat. Used centennial hops. Brewing it tonight actually, going to try Maris otter instead of 2-row.

 

MO gets bitter in a hurry IMO, I would maybe put 20% MO and 80% Pale just to do something different.

The more I play with MO the less I seem to like it for some reason.

 

Now that is interesting. I don't think I've heard of MO getting bitter.

 

Yea, there's nothing bitter about Maris Otter which is just another variety of 2-row barley. It's just bready, malty goodness.