Additional Ingredients

[chad610]

I am a very new home brewer and so far I am having a blast. I am learning all kinds of new stuff everyday, I was scared to death of a second fermenter!! LoL!

The question I have is if i want to get creative and add different ingredients, what step do I need to do this?

Is it during the actual brewing process? or when combining with the water to ferment? or with the priming sugar before bottling?

Any help would be outstanding!!!

 

[Dr Malt]

It depends on what the different ingredient is as to when you add it. If its a different grain, you can add it during the brewing process, but if it is a liquid flavor, you can add it a bottling or kegging. Other ingredients can be added to the primary or secondary fermentation. It depends on the ingredient you are considering.

Dr Malt

 

[chad610]

I'm wanting to start simple by adding honey to a batch. I just wanna get creative with different fruit/honey flavors.

 

[HickoryMike]

My suggestion would be to find recipes for these "out of the box" beers you want to try and start there. Instead of randomly throwing crap in the fermenter, try something tried and true. After you taste the final product, then start tweaking (I would recommend beersmith for this process).

I'm in the same boat as you--I want to create my own stuff but I simply don't have the knowledge to build my own recipes yet. Thankfully, HBT is an excellent resource to find tested recipes.

Something to consider anyways...

 

[Palefire]

Honey probably won't add much "honey" flavor to your beer. For that you'd need honey malt. All honey will do will be to dry the beer out and boost the alcohol. Some people have reported success with adding the honey at flame out to get actual honey flavor, but I've personally never tried that.

Just my $0.02, FWIW (maybe not much!): it's a really good idea when you're first starting out to make some simple beers so you can get your process down. Just make regular beers to make sure you can do that without any problems, then worry about adding fruit or whatever. If you start too early with fruit or additions, when you have problems it'll be really difficult to figure out what they are, whereas if you start with basic beers it'll be a lot easier. Plus simple beers are really tasty!

 

[Netflyer]

About 8 mos ago I tried making a 'honey porter' it came out like Palefire suggested, dry and hot... like wicked cough medicine and strangely it is all but gone, people will drink anything ;p.. But I have read that one of the ways you can use honey and get the honey taste is to just pasteurize the honey in the high 170F's and then add it at flameout.. haven't tried it yet... I like the idea of using a honey malt instead too... good suggestion!

 

[chad610]

Sweet! Thanks for all the input. I'm definitely going to be doing the basic beers for a while. I would've never known to add honey malt instead of actual honey! I'm telling you I learn new home brew things everyday.

Thanks again!