For Real, Actual Gingerbread Beer

[torilen]

So...I found a recipe for an Old English/Colonial type beer.
Basically, it is water, molasses, honey, sugar, and a touch of hops.
I decided to try an experiment for it. I don't have hops on hand
at the time, but I put everything else together and it tasted great,
so I set it to brewing. So far, so good.

Of course, this is the kind of thing where you really have to like
molasses. If you don't, you would not like this at all.

But this got me thinking...gingerbread. There are several commercial
beers that claim to have a gingerbread beer...Hardywood, for example.
And yes, it has a good flavor, but not exactly what I could call a for real,
true gingerbread flavor.

So I did a preliminary test this afternoon. I brewed ginger water with toasted oats in it. (Malted oats would work better, I'm sure...don't have those right now). I strained it and put in some molasses and honey and sugar...cooked it a bit and cooled it off. It's not bad.

I'll work on the recipe...the molasses was a bit too strong and it overpowered the ginger and oats. But I think this will work for a beer.

Stay tuned. I should be getting it brewing this weekend.

 

[Revvy]

Six years ago I had a thread on my Gingersnap Brown Ale...similar idea...I mashed with actually gingersnaps in the mash tun...then at priming I infused the priming sugar with ginger while boiling it (unfortunately the pics of the priming got lost in an update on here.)

should give you some ideas...

Hmm, need to revisit this again I have a fantastic Brown ale based on Smuttydog's brown ale, that would be a great base for gingerbread or gingersnaps.

 

[torilen]

So, the molasses wine/beer...whatever you want to call it...came out okay. Molasses was quite strong. I like molasses, but wow...almost too much, even for me.

Thanks to forum member buMbLeB, by the way, for the new name on this...Rum Wine.

I found an actual recipe here for a gingerbread beer. I was going to try that straight, but I looked up some recipes for German Lebkuchen (Christmas gingerbread, basically) and I think I will merge the two.

Here is what I will be looking at - not sure of amounts yet.
brown sugar
honey
orange liqueur (will use orange zest instead, to get the oils)
orange juice (fresh squeezed, of course...won't be a lot)
ground ginger (will use fresh ginger for this)
ground cinnamon (will most likely use cinnamon stick for this)
ground nutmeg
ground cloves (will use a couple of whole cloves...not too much of this taste)
raisins (might use dried cranberries instead...don't know yet)
slivered almonds (or simply crushed almonds)
oats (not much for this...just for a bit of under-flavor and mouth feel)

I will be getting this started by Friday afternoon at the latest, maybe earlier. I'll keep you posted.