Banana Mishmash--Poisonous?

[ishkabibble]

Unlike Vern Tessio, if I had to eat one thing for the rest of my life (beer being a liquid here and not technically something you'd eat), I'd pick bananas.

Thinking about how jungle peoples must surely make some kind of brew out of such starchy sources, I shot from the hip...

I boiled some bananas and threw them in sanitized water jugs along with some dates, brown sugar, cherrios and bread yeast. The fermentation was a wild affair that stopped after a few days. Now I'm left with three jugs of beautifully-scented vomit.

I had intended on straining out the schmutz, allowing the residual juice(?) to further clarify, if such a thing is possible.

Questions:
1) Is this a complete waste of time, or is this going to yield something palateable, if not at least interesting?
2) Should I carbonate such a thing?
3) How can you tell if something will poison you?

and finally

4) There could be one or three small dead fruitflies in each one (I skipped airlocks and just went with cracked caps). I'm not squeamish about nature--what we all ingest on the microscopic level is horrid--but I don't want to die either. What do you reckon the odds are this stuff will be ok once strained? Should I maybe heat the resultant liquor to 160F just to be sure, cool it and pitch another yeast?

 

[weirdboy]

The fruit flies are going to leave you with vinegar. Vinegar won't kill you but it won't taste very good, either.

 

[jmg727]

Last night I mashed (at 148F) about 8 lbs of bananas (net of peel) with a pound of 6-row and 1 lb of honey. I blended the banana with about 1 gallon water and added amylase enzyme. When done, I was able to extract about 1.5 gallons of super-banana-ey liquid at about 1.060 with a strainer. I heated that wort up to 205F, and when it cooled down to about 120F I added some pectin enzyme, then finally pitched t-58 and put it into a carboy. It started fermenting within two hours, and by this morning it was going pretty well. I'll check it again this evening. If my final result retains some banana taste, my next batch will include several pounds of 2-row or MO. Any experience with brewing bananas would be much appreciated!!!

 

[captainL]

People make banana wine. From what I hear it's close to flavorless.maybe like a dry white wine?? I know a lot of people will add a small portion of bananas to fruit wine to add thickness and body. As far as cooking and mashing them.....good luck.

 

[drlars]

​

I'm a beginner who is only on my fifth beer now. But my second was a hefeweizen with about 4# bananas thrown in. I had chopped them into segments, froze them, thawed them, then blended them with 99 Bananas liquor to sanitize, before adding them to the primary (after the iniital vigorous fermentation had slowed in about 7 days). The yeast said 'thanks' and promptly blew out my fermentation lock (since then I've used a blowoff setup).

​

Final product was more like a strong weizenbock. It is decent, but I still only have a hint of the banana, and its unclear whether or not this is from the Bavarian wheat strain or not. Unsure of ABV due to the banana addition (figured "at least" 5.6% but after imbibing, I suspect the bananas made it a bit higher). I think those things ferment out pretty completely.

​

I say 'weizenbock' because the other notable thing is that the beer was much darker than I had anticipated. I had put a little bit of lime juice in with the banana slurry as well to try to combat it, but I suspect the bananas may have oxidized and darkened the beer as well. If I ever tried it again, I would likely resort to banana flavor extract.

​

I was hoping for something more on the order of Wells Banana Bread beer, but it didn't happen. (It does say on their label that they brew with bananas and also use banana flavor though.)

 

[Yooper]

People make banana wine. From what I hear it's close to flavorless.maybe like a dry white wine?? I know a lot of people will add a small portion of bananas to fruit wine to add thickness and body. As far as cooking and mashing them.....good luck.

Banana wine is great! I highly recommend making it, and enjoying it.

The recipe I have posted is pretty good, but I can't take credit for it. It's from Jack Keller, the wine guru.

 

[unionrdr]

Look up Andrew Zimern on youtube. The guy that eats all the wierd stuff. He was in some African country where the locals made banana beer in these tree bark trenchers. Drank it cloudy. It looked like a white wheat ale pretty much. Filtered through grasses or something that looked rather course.