Blue beer: lets beat this dead horse

[Grod1]

it was kind of boring. it has a 3.77 on untapped. with around 40 ratings. the over all is its not enough beer. i would up/add something to make it more malt forward.
All that aside its magenta or purple /cobalt but in no way a stable blue. the whole recipe can be altered if your not looking for blue.
Also the hops could be more forward but i pulled half of it for souring and had to keep the ibus low.
The remaining 14 gallons got artificial blue dye in the form of blue raspberry slushy mix and has a blue krussen/now pellical.

 

[divrack]

Water from melted icebergs....
Haaaaaaa!
Blue beer indeed. All this talk is getting in the way of me drinking good beer.
Gentlemen, goodnight!

 

[Rob2010SS]

So, tried making a blue beer with these flowers. Definitely didn't get blue as you can see from the pictures. Had high hopes during fermentation because it looked like a dark blue in the flask. However, pouring it into a glass, it's clearly NOT blue, LOL. Back to the drawing board...

 

[TwistedGray]

But tis pretty!

 

[NinjaBear]

Too much acidity

 

[TwistedGray]

So, tried making a blue beer with these flowers. Definitely didn't get blue as you can see from the pictures. Had high hopes during fermentation because it looked like a dark blue in the flask. However, pouring it into a glass, it's clearly NOT blue, LOL. Back to the drawing board...

View attachment 599929 View attachment 599930 View attachment 599931

The flowers add any flavor or aroma?

 

[Northern_Brewer]

So, tried making a blue beer with these flowers. Definitely didn't get blue as you can see from the pictures. Had high hopes during fermentation because it looked like a dark blue in the flask. However, pouring it into a glass, it's clearly NOT blue, LOL. Back to the drawing board...

Play with the pH, this stuff appears to be pH-sensitive.

 

[Rob2010SS]

Play with the pH, this stuff appears to be pH-sensitive.

Haven't checked ph yet but i plan to. How would you raise the ph of a fermented beer? I saw somewhere that dry hopping raises ph? Any other ways?

 

[Rob2010SS]

The flowers add any flavor or aroma?

I feel like it did add a little bit of a flowery taste. Not 100% sure though. Not so much on the smell though

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Haven't checked ph yet but i plan to. How would you raise the ph of a fermented beer? I saw somewhere that dry hopping raises ph? Any other ways?

In the first instance, just add vinegar or any other acid to reduce the pH of a sample and see what happens to the colour, and vice versa use baking soda or any other alkali to increase pH. As I mention above there's a commercial gin that relies on adding tonic water to change the colour.

Once you see what the response is and what pH you want, then you can figure out how to change it in a more beer-friendly way, we're just not quite sure how it responds yet.

 

[passedpawn]

It's very responsive to pH. Fun to make a blue tea with it, add a drop or two of lemon juice, and it goes purple.

 

[skibb]

Ok - so I don't think you will ever get blue because beer is inherently yellow/brown - adding blue only turns it purple - I think this has been fairly well established in this thread...

Start with taking the color out of beer via boiling with activated charcoal - can drop it below 1 srm.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2006046879A2/en

Then add blue food coloring or blueberries etc. (Not pea flower/blossoms)

 

[Ted_Pino]

To reiterate that the pea blossoms won't make a blue beer, I experimented with the pH sensitivity to see if I could get a palatable blue beer.

I took a very pale, passionfruit sour ale I made and added the blossoms. It turned it a nice purple color and at first I added a baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) solution until it turned a nice blue. I did a quick pH test with pH paper and it was around 6-7 when it turned blue. The original sample is on the right and the baking soda sample is on the left. It tasted awful. It was a little salty and a bit like alka-selzter. I don't recommend it.

Then, I added a calcium hydroxide solution, thinking it would be more palatable. It turned blue at the same pH and when I tried it, it straight up tasted like water. It was the strangest thing. There was absolutely no flavor. I couldn't even taste the passionfruit I added to the beer. Maybe if there were stronger flavors, they might come through, but it definitely didn't taste like beer.

I think the moral of the story is the pea blossoms make purple beer and I don't recommend neutralizing your beer, unless you want it to taste watery. Maybe blue spirulina might be worth exploring if you want to go the natural color route.

 

[Lefou]

I wouldn't bank on this beer achieving or keeping a foam stand, either. A certain amount of hop oil and protein is needed to bind to make foam and adjusting pH seems to have a detergent effect. Foam isn't really a byproduct you'd expect of wine, but most expect it with beer.

 

[FatDragon]

…I took a very pale, passionfruit sour ale I made …

To be fair, you started with a sour so you had to add more baking soda than a regular beer would need for the pH adjustment. I doubt a regular beer would fare much better, but it bears mentioning.

 

[Lefou]

That's why I mentioned the foam angle.
Dissolved CO2 in the beer will render carbonic acid, so neutralizing to achieve the blue color will affect your bubbles.
I like those tiny bubbles in my beer, but if you look around the forums, there are people who DO drink wort tea (me) and also drink the raw ale.

 

[bmaupin]

Organic Phycocyanin, broken cell blue spirulina powder extract, non-GMO https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BZ968RM/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

looks interesting, but flavor addition could be terrible

 

[Apimyces]

To reiterate that the pea blossoms won't make a blue beer, I experimented with the pH sensitivity to see if I could get a palatable blue beer.

I took a very pale, passionfruit sour ale I made and added the blossoms. It turned it a nice purple color and at first I added a baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) solution until it turned a nice blue. I did a quick pH test with pH paper and it was around 6-7 when it turned blue. The original sample is on the right and the baking soda sample is on the left. It tasted awful. It was a little salty and a bit like alka-selzter. I don't recommend it.

Then, I added a calcium hydroxide solution, thinking it would be more palatable. It turned blue at the same pH and when I tried it, it straight up tasted like water. It was the strangest thing. There was absolutely no flavor. I couldn't even taste the passionfruit I added to the beer. Maybe if there were stronger flavors, they might come through, but it definitely didn't taste like beer.

I think the moral of the story is the pea blossoms make purple beer and I don't recommend neutralizing your beer, unless you want it to taste watery. Maybe blue spirulina might be worth exploring if you want to go the natural color route.
View attachment 600510

As it was already said, you started with a sour base... when the goal is to increase the pH close to neutrality.

Not sure I follow the rest, though. You tried to rise the pH of one batch with sodium bicarbonate, and of the other with calcium hydroxide? Or did you use both of these on the same batch?

The amount of sodium bicarbonate needed to neutralize a sour is indeed pretty certain to give it a strong sodium taste. As for calcium hydroxide... hmm, guess it's quite plausible that the calcium could bind a lot of flavor/aroma molecules. Probably would have needed something more aromatic and flavorful to begin with, and with a high base pH, definitely not a sour.

 

[NinjaBear]

The flowers themselves are basic and while not as strong a neutralizer as sodium bicarbonate they are also mostly tasteless.

So technique is going to be as important as ingredients.

This is a small bottle of an acidic wild berry wine that I put through a refining process to remove some color but preserve flavor, and used the flowers to neutralize the acidity.

If part of the beer is removed, refined in a similar way, additional flowers used to raise the pH and then added back to the bulk of the beer, if it’s basic enough when adding it back, it should pull it out of the purple/magenta color and make it more blue while still preserving the hoppy flavors.

Which I’m now trying to do.

 

[Apimyces]

Nice.

 

[NinjaBear]

This is promising. A couple days fermenting and it has turned more blue. I was expecting to see it more purple as the fermentation continued.

 

[Julian Høstan Urrea]

wow! looks great! cant wait to see the finished product!

 

[Nenad]

@Rob2010SS Thats a great colour, I am amazed. Can you post a recepie or its a secret I would like to brew that same colour

 

[NinjaBear]

@Rob2010SS Thats a great colour, I am amazed. Can you post a recepie or its a secret I would like to brew that same colour

I’ll post the complete process once I’m done.
I did start with Northern Brewer’s Prohibition Lager.

I’m A little concerned I stalled out the fermentation. My brewery has been fairly stable at 55° but there is currently 0 airlock activity.

And that is when I realized I forgot to get a starting gravity. [emoji29]

But the pH is at 4.7 and the color is that shades of blue-purple/magenta past attempts have achieved.

So I’m making a yeast starter to add when I start the clearing process tomorrow. Just in case.

And I’ll be making an alcohol based extract of the flowers to make a neutralizing agent at the end before kegging.

 

[NinjaBear]

It’s actually kind of cool, I can’t quite get the picture to show it

But in different lights/angles it has different shades.

 

[NinjaBear]

For some context, this is the color of the corn sugar water I’m planning to use to clear the beer. And I think this is the blue that we all hope to achieve.

This has a pH of 5.8

Not that far off from my Fermented beer so far.

I do believe that I’m on the right track to make the first true blue beer.

 

[NinjaBear]

Again, lighting doesn’t do it justice. I’m not a professional photographer.

But it’s currently such a pretty blue.

We’ll see how it stands up to a couple more weeks of fermenting/clearing.

 

[Beerswimmer]

So cool!

 

[Rob2010SS]

Pretty cool color @NinjaBear . If you're successful, would love to see how you did it. Can you elaborate more on the "refining process" you mentioned a couple posts up?

 

[NinjaBear]

I’m sure some beer purists out there would crucify me for this…

I found that adding a wash of water plus corn sugar for a similar SG boiled with the same hop addition time/ratio as the original into the brew during secondary will lighten the color and make the end result a lot clearer.

It’s something I first started with wine and juice concentrate to increase the ABV.

Gave it a try with a beer and corn sugar (without the hops the first time) and got a beer that tasted almost exactly like Coors Lite.

But that took color very well when I used koolaid flavor liquids to turn them into wine coolers.

Tried it again with a honey Amber this time using extra honey and the same hops and got a very crisp, clear amber beer that didn’t lose the hop notes.

So I figured since the wine coolers took artificial color so well, it might be the key to finally getting a true natural blue ale.

The final step I plan is to make an extract of the blue flowers to hopefully be able to move the final result from the fermented 4.7 pH to the unfermented (and color I hope for) 5.8 ph.

After that, my biggest concern is the kegging. Since I don’t have a nitro system, I’ll need to keg in CO2. Which forms carbonic acid. So it’s possible that even if it goes in the perfect blue, it might come back out with those Magenta tones.