Help: Peanut Butter & Honey Hef

[PorterV]

Hi all! I'm trying to develop a new beer to get started on this week. My inspiration was growing up eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I have a baseline for a recipe, but this is incredibly adventurous so any input would be much appreciated before I pull the trigger and buy the ingredients.

Before I get started, I've brewed honey ales before. I know plenty of people claim that honey dries out beer without much addition to flavor. I strongly disagree. From my experience, sure, while it may not add many sweet malty flavors it adds tons of floral notes and aromas and I've never had any issues with my ales becoming alcohol-forward. Honey is a must in this recipe, please don't tell me to leave it out or substitute it with honey malt. I've heard it before! RAW HONEY FTW

So for my brew I'm thinking of doing a ratio of 1:1 for pilsner malt and white wheat
From there, 25% of the total fermentables will bee honey.
And about 6% crystal 10 for head retention
For the peanut butter I'm planning on using PB2 powder. This I have not done before.

The plan is to brew up with all the malts as normal, making a low gravity beer with lots of water. Then, after 5 days of fermentation, create a slurry of the honey and PB2, pasturize it, and pitch it into the fermenter. I feel this will retain as much peanut butter and honey flavors as possible.

I know I'm jumping around and not giving exact measurements, so I'll attach a screenshot of the recipe calculator.

 

[lumpher]

My first thought is to ditch the C10. Wheat is used for head retention because it's great at it, so no need to add Crystal malt.

 

[AlexKay]

There is some (not terribly strong or conclusive, but some) evidence that crystal malts harm foam. And as @lumpher says, with all that wheat, you're going to have the best foam anyhow.

My only advice is to go for understated peanut butter flavor. Too little and it will still be be beer. Too much and it will be vile.

 

[Snuffy]

I would experiment with a small batch first. That's a lot of time and money to gamble on an untried recipe.
(he says, sipping his Philly Soured "Flanders Red" with a grimace)

 

[worlddivides]

My only advice is to go for understated peanut butter flavor. Too little and it will still be be beer. Too much and it will be vile.

While you do have a point, I find that the only peanut butter beers I've ever had that had enough peanut butter flavor were commercial, and even then, many commercial peanut butter stouts I've had were seriously lacking in peanut butter flavor. I think it's a similar issue to trying to get chocolate flavor into beer via cacao nibs. It's usually a very restrained flavor that's in the background unless you do a massive amount. But the point that you have, which is a valid one, is that too little is generally preferable to too much. In my case, though, I'm sick of there being too little, so I drafted up a chocolate peanut butter stout recipe that also uses PB2 powder and it uses way more than any homebrewer recipe I've seen, partially because they all seem to result in too little peanut butter flavor (specifically 1 and a half jars of PB2 for 3 gallons). Granted, mine might be too much (but I know 1 jar is too little). It's a difficult dilemma because you can drink through a whole batch of a good beer that doesn't have enough of the flavor you went for, but too much of that flavor can make you just not want to drink the beer. But at the same time, the entire purpose of making the beer (at least in my case) is to get that flavor.

In this case, though, I don't think the OP is going to get a lot of honey flavor from the honey since about 100% of the sugar will be fermented out and he'll only be left with some of the aromatics, which can be pretty subtle, though probably noticeable at 25% of the fermentables. So using a lot of peanut butter here could completely drown out any honey character.

 

[Rish]

Maybe consider some like this so you can add a little at a time until you get the taste you prefer.
https://southernhomebrew.com/natural-peanut-butter-flavoring-extract-4oz/

 

[Hoochin'Fool]

Maybe consider some like this so you can add a little at a time until you get the taste you prefer.
https://southernhomebrew.com/natural-peanut-butter-flavoring-extract-4oz/

I'll second Rish's suggestion: Brewer's Best Peanut Butter Flavor extract, at 4 ounces per 5 gallons beer (a fairly simple 6% abv, 30 ibu, american stout) turned out really nice, I just added it straight to the bottling bucket.

 

[PorterV]

Apologies y'all! I've been away for a while. I'm taking all of your suggestions into account. I've removed the crystal altogether from the recipe (yay money saved). I'm also going to use Brewer's Best peanut butter flavoring so that I can recirculate the beer post fermentation and filteration while in the bright. I'll add small amounts while circulating and tasting so I can get the flavor just right I hope.

 

[odie]

I would think you want to kick up the "banana" part of the hefe to balance the PB.

Didn't Elvis like PB and banana sandwiches? Call it the Elvis Special?