honey ale questions

[colinwollmann]

I was just wondering, how do most of you guys brew honey ales?What I mean is ,do you add the honey to the boil, or just throw it in the primary?I,ve been adding mine with 15min. to go in the boil,and wanna try something different.
I also want to keep using real honey and not switch to honey malt because of costs .

cheers Cmann

 

[Arneba28]

Honey malt is real cheap though. Any honey ale that your going to make wont have more then maybe a pound of honey malt anyway and thats all of $1.75. I have found that adds much more of a real mellow honey taste and aroma then liquid honey can.

 

[Revvy]

Use the search function, almost weekly (including yesterday) someone asks the same question, there's been a lot of good threads on it lately, you'll find plenty of information and several tasty sounding recipes....

I may even do one of them myself someday.

 

[BierMuncher]

There's no similarity between honey and honey malt. One is a simple sugar, the other is a kilned barley grain that is designed to leave some residual sweetness in the beer.

Honey does ferment out nearly completely (though it is painstakingly slow).

At any rate, I'd be wary of adding honey to a fermenter without the sterilization that boiling brings.

 

[z987k]

I always add it to the fermenter.... no right way to do it, just whatever you feel gives you the end result you're after.

We don't even boil our meads one bit. Just warm water to dissolve the honey.

 

[Moonshae]

A great honey ale recipe that I find drinkable and well balanced:

7 lbs honey
2.5 oz kent goldings
1 lime, sliced
5 tsp yeast nutrients
dry nottingham yeast

Add honey as you would extract, and the lime. Boil the hops for 60 mins. At flameout, fish out the lime slices. Don't forget to add the nutrients!

The resulting ale has a nice honey flavor without being cloying, and is extremely pale with a creamy white head.

You could easily tinker with the hops to use less of a higher AA at bittering and including some aroma hops at the end.

 

[derogg]

I have used honey to prime a honey blonde with. Gave kind of a neat carbonation. I don't think there is any good way to get honey flavor into your beer unless you back sweeten into your glass before you pour. Even honey malt doesn't taste like honey. I think the name confuses lots of people. - Dirk