Honeybush "Tea" for Beer

[Ratdog]

I bought a pound of honeybush "tea" and I just love it. To me, it has a pleasant, mild sweetness and has the taste and aroma of freshly fallen autumn leaves. I'd really like to brew a fall beer with it, but I'm struggling to find any information on using it in beer. Honeybush is supposedly a cousin of rooibos, but information on brewing with rooibos is also hard to come by.

Does anyone have experience brewing with either that they can share? Thank you!

 

[cmac62]

Honeybush Vanilla B3DM (Bray’s 3 Day Mead) not using in a beer, but here is one using it in a mead.

I've never used it, but if I did I would make my beer a little stronger and add some strong tea when packaging/kegging/bottling. Good luck

 

[Ratdog]

Thanks. That might be a tasty mead, but I think it would be overkill if scaled up for beer.

I decided on a 100% pilsner malt Munich Helles, and added 24 grams of honeybush tea leaves in the 5.5 gallon batch. 8 grams of tea was added at 15, 10, and 5 minutes remaining in the boil. I'll report back on the finished beer.

 

[Ratdog]

I brewed a 5.5 gallon batch with 24 grams as specified. Feedback was mixed.

Here are some additional notes for anyone who might want to use honeybush in beer:

• My wife loved this beer and I found it to be a nice enough fall beer. I felt as though what I enjoyed about the tea leaves came through without any real surprise, other than there was practically no color adjustment.
• I entered it a reputable competition. Score sheet comments said it was overkill and I need to scale back the HB or choose a different style.

My wife would like me to brew this one again. If I have to guess what I'll do, I'll go with one 8g addition at 5 minutes and keep the rest the same.

 

[Dland]

Interesting ingredient option. Anyway, mainly here to advise to brew to one's own taste. If entering competitions is fun for you , that's cool, but don't put much weight in results. Otherwise, you might end up chasing judging category styles, instead of perfecting your favorite brews to drink.

 

[Ratdog]

Interesting ingredient option. Anyway, mainly here to advise to brew to one's own taste. If entering competitions is fun for you , that's cool, but don't put much weight in results. Otherwise, you might end up chasing judging category styles, instead of perfecting your favorite brews to drink.

I totally agree with you. That's where the inspiration came from - we were drinking the tea, and said, this could be good in a fall beer. Beyond bringing beer to homebrew club meetings, I do two or three competitions a year in an attempt to get objective feedback on my brewing. If something scores well and wins something, great; if not, I can hopefully learn something about my process from the judges and become a better brewer because of it. Thanks for your feedback!