A little help with a recipe

[greenmage]

I was watching this BBC documentary about vikings and he tried a traditional mead that sounded pretty good, but only listed a few ingredients. And sounds more like a braggot, which I haven't tried as of yet.
Basic ingredients named were honey, malted wheat, bog myrtle for bitter and cranberries.
So my thoughts were to use malted wheat, probably hops for bitter and blueberries (I'm kinda partial to blueberries and don't really care for cranberries)

So from what I understand braggots get half of fermentables from grains and half from honey... So if I usually use 3 lbs of honey in a gallon batch, would it be a straight split of 1.5lbs malted wheat and 1.5lbs honey? I'm not sure how malted wheat effects gravity... Was also planning on using an ale yeast instead of a wine yeast.

My recipe in the works so far(1 gallon test batch)...
1lb white wheat malt
1lb red wheat malt
1oz calypso hops for bitter
2lbs honey
1-2lbs blueberries
Wyeast 1028 London ale

Any tips would be appreciated, I haven't done a beer yet but I imagine the procedure is similar?

 

[bernardsmith]

Great question greenmage - and many people may have many different answers but for what it's worth mine is this: If you want to make a delicious braggot I would look for a really good, if basic, beer recipe and add your honey to that recipe.

I have yet to try to make beer with wheat but I am sure that wheat can make a delicious beer. There are however, lots and lots of good if not great small batch beer recipes. To the beer recipe (those recipes provide you with the amount of time you might want to boil some or all of the hops) you might simply add your honey. This honey would add flavor notes - so you might want to consider what variety of honey you want to add (just "honey"? or orange blossom honey? or acacia honey or ..? ). If you use DME (dry malt extract) or LME (liquid malt extract) then all the work of extraction has been done by the maltser and you can save hours mashing and boiling (boiling because technically, the mash has already been boiled and the DME and LME are the equivalent of a dehydrated mash but you might want to reboil this extract if you are adding bittering hops, or flavor hops but you can also dry hop).

The other point I want to make is that the more fermentables in your must/wort the longer you will need to age your braggot. Rule of thumb, one month for every %ABV. But your "recipe" suggests a potential ABV of almost 20%. You really need to know what you are doing when you are fermenting at anything like the starting gravity you will have (about 1.150). It's not even clear to me that this will not cause osmotic shock when you pitch ANY kind of yeast. It's a little like asking an Olympic swimmer to swim in a pool of molasses..

 

[greenmage]

Great question greenmage - and many people may have many different answers but for what it's worth mine is this: If you want to make a delicious braggot I would look for a really good, if basic, beer recipe and add your honey to that recipe.

I have yet to try to make beer with wheat but I am sure that wheat can make a delicious beer. There are however, lots and lots of good if not great small batch beer recipes. To the beer recipe (those recipes provide you with the amount of time you might want to boil some or all of the hops) you might simply add your honey. This honey would add flavor notes - so you might want to consider what variety of honey you want to add (just "honey"? or orange blossom honey? or acacia honey or ..? ). If you use DME (dry malt extract) or LME (liquid malt extract) then all the work of extraction has been done by the maltser and you can save hours mashing and boiling (boiling because technically, the mash has already been boiled and the DME and LME are the equivalent of a dehydrated mash but you might want to reboil this extract if you are adding bittering hops, or flavor hops but you can also dry hop).

The other point I want to make is that the more fermentables in your must/wort the longer you will need to age your braggot. Rule of thumb, one month for every %ABV. But your "recipe" suggests a potential ABV of almost 20%. You really need to know what you are doing when you are fermenting at anything like the starting gravity you will have (about 1.150). It's not even clear to me that this will not cause osmotic shock when you pitch ANY kind of yeast. It's a little like asking an Olympic swimmer to swim in a pool of molasses..

Thanks! I will have to look into DME/LME a little more. As far as honey I have clover and buckwheat honey on hand, was planning a mix that's heavier on clover. I'm aiming for a SG of about 1.100-1.110 with a 10% ale yeast should leave just enough residual sweetness to balance the hops, just wasn't sure about the malt...

 

[bernardsmith]

Thanks! I will have to look into DME/LME a little more. As far as honey I have clover and buckwheat honey on hand, was planning a mix that's heavier on clover. I'm aiming for a SG of about 1.100-1.110 with a 10% ale yeast should leave just enough residual sweetness to balance the hops, just wasn't sure about the malt...

But grain has lots of unfermentable sugars - which is one reason why for hundreds and hundreds of years ales (and beers ) were made with herbs to bitter the drink so that it would not be cloyingly sweet. Absent all honey and absent any residual sugar being left behind because the yeast have quit because their tolerance for alcohol has been exceeded by the amount of fermentable sugar in solution - you can still expect the final gravity to be around 1.015 ( a beer made with all grain might need about 2.5 lbs / gallon to produce a wort that is ready for pitching at 1.050 and might finish at 1.015 (and so with 35 points of sugar fermented or an ABV of about 4.5- 5%) Using LME or DME you are assured of far greater efficiency so you might use about 1- 1.5 lb of malt extract in each gallon. But I would research recipes...

 

[greenmage]

Ok so reading some recipes it seems to be between 2-3 lbs grain for a gallon batch of wheat beer, so would it be fair to assume that I could pretty much split that 50/50 with honey? Also are nutrient additions required as with a traditional mead?

Recipe in works...
1-1.5lb mn red wheat malt
1lb local buckwheat honey
3lbs frozen blueberries I picked earlier this year
~5g calypso hops for bitter
Wyeast 1028 London ale

More likely I'll be just adding honey to get to 1.050-1.060