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Cinchona bark to bitter a gruit?

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csurowiec

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I have some interesting herbs and things that I bought to make homemade tonic syrup for gin & tonics. I've made the syrup and it makes the best G&Ts ever. At last weeks meeting my homebrew club started talking about having a gruit as the style of the month sometime soon and now I want to brew one. My mind went to the stuff I have for making the tonic syrup and I wondered if any of it could work.
Cinchona bark is the primary bittering ingredient in tonic and I'm thinking it will work to bitter beer but figured I would ask if anyone has tried it and if it worked.
 
I've had Invisible Ink from Brass Castle in Yorkshire, which contained cinchona and was very nice :
https://twitter.com/brasscastlebeer/status/772796071961583616

So it's certainly possible - I guess the way to do it would be to make a cinchona tea and add it stepwise in drops to a pint to allow you to calibrate how much you would need for a bigger batch? I'm not sure whether it would have the same antibacterial activity as hops though.

I'm intrigued by your tonic syrup, what goes into it?
 
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