The braggot experiment

[rexbanner]

I've never had a braggot before, and I wanted to try brewing one to see if I liked it. The problem was that there just weren't a lot of braggot recipes out there, and the ones that I found were all 1.120 monsters that I would have to leave alone for at least a year before drinking. So I decided to brew three small batches from the second runnings of an old ale I wanted to brew. The recipes are hybridizations with an ESB, brown ale/porter, and stout. I want to find out which beer style is a good base for a braggot.

All recipes are just around 1.060 OG, 1.75 gallons, and 20 IBU with EKG for hops

ESBraggot:
10% c-60
45% MO
45% honey
WLP002

Brown Braggot:
5.5% chocolate malt (British)
7.3% C-60
43.6% MO
43.6% honey
WLP002

Stout Braggot
7% C-40
7% roasted barley
43% MO
43% honey
Nottingham

They went into the fermenters last night. I'll follow up on this in about two months.

 

[madipop]

I recently brewed a braggot, like you just to satisfy my curiosity. For the sake of convenience I used nothing but honey, dark dme and 2oz of cascade on an 05 yeast cake and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. It's made a nice winter warmer

 

[rexbanner]

I recently brewed a braggot, like you just to satisfy my curiosity. For the sake of convenience I used nothing but honey, dark dme and 2oz of cascade on an 05 yeast cake and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. It's made a nice winter warmer

What OG was it and how long did you wait to drink it? I was thinking 2 months after bottling for 1.060. Also, did it have any sweetness from the honey, or was it mostly dry?

 

[madipop]

Hopville . "Raggedy Ass Braggot"

My results pretty much matched the recipe info @ hopville, although I think I kegged after about three weeks & the braggot has continued to develop complexity. EDIT: sorry, had to re-read your last post. at kegging the braggot had a ton of honey flavor, but it faded after carbonating and has faded more so with time. Still a very drinkable brew though. Cheers !

 

[rexbanner]

I just bottled them and tasted them today.

They are still so young, it is impossible to really judge them. They definitely exhibit the characters of their parent beers, simple recipes for ESB, brown ale, and stout. They definitely need to age for a bit. The roasty-ness in the stout needs to mellow, and all three have a bit of astringency. If I had to pick my favorite right now, it would be the brown.

 

[rexbanner]

OK, here's the final results:

Stout braggot: Roasty and astringent, with no malt to back it up. If I did it again, I'd cut the RB in half and make up the difference with carafa, or possibly just go with just carafa and caramel 40. Since I've never brewed with honey, I was unaware that honey provides so much less of a backbone than base malt.

Brown braggot: Chocolate with a hint of roastyness. A tasty enough beer, nothing too amazing, hovering between a brown ale and a porter.

ESBraggot: Here's where the money is. This is a damned good beer. Smooth caramel with a hint of British yeast character. This is the style I prefer, and if you brew a braggot, I would recommend using. Man, I could go for another right now, and it's 11 AM.

Anyways, I hope anyone interested in brewing a braggot finds this thread. It's not my favorite style but I'll definitely try making the esbraggot from some second runnings in the future.

 

[bronzdragon]

I've brewed several braggots over the years. I'm also a mead brewer. I've tried different styles and my favorite combination has to be a Scottish Ale type of beer with honey. Golden promise malt is excellent with honey. The last few times, I've done about a 1.050 beer with Golden Promise and then kick up to about 1.080 with honey. Choose a Noble hop and just use some in the boil, but not a lot. This is about malt and honey!

The honey choice makes a big difference also. I prefer apple honey but your mileage may vary on different types. Orange blossom tends to be nice in small quantities but can be overpowering, I think.

Make a good yeast starter of a strong ale yeast. And this beer, like any other with honey, benefits with some aging. I typically keg, but this type of beer I bottle in large bottles and let age.

I usually go through the primary and then a couple months in the secondary before I bottle.

cheers

~rc~

 

[frozt]

Not to get off-topic, but bronzdragon, do you have any experience using sourwood honey? I'm planning on using a smaller amount in an upcoming brew of a blonde ale and have some local sourwood on hand. Would another type of honey be better?

 

[bronzdragon]

I have not used sourwood honey. However, I have used probably a dozen different types over the years. What I've found, is that generally the darker the honey, the stronger the flavor. And just like any other ingredient, the stronger the flavor, the more it will affect the flavor of the beer.

Get a small jar of it for sampling. Taste some when you haven't had anything else to drink or eat for awhile and take note of a few things. 1) mainly the overall flavor. Is this a strong flavored honey...some are and don't particularly go well in beer or wine. I think usually if you would like to sit down and eat some of the honey spread on toast for breakfast, then the flavor will be ok for brewing with. Some have smoky or strong herbal flavors which don't go well.

And 2) take note of overall how sweet you think it is. The sweeter it is, the more it will affect your gravity usually. Honey's vary widely in sweetness and also water content, so some are more concentrated then others.

Overall, I'd say taste it, if you like the flavor, then you would be safe in putting from 1 to 3 pounds into your blond ale. 3 pounds and you're probably going to taste the honey in the end, 1 pound and it will probably not be all that noticeable.

Record how it turns out and in the future adjust to your tastes. Also keep in mind, that just like all other brewing ingredients, the harvest from year to year changes. The flavors will change especially if the bees get over into a different type of vegetation.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm kind of a honey geek.

cheers

~rc~

 

[kellanv]

I second taste testing various honeys to try to get a good profile/blend in the final result. There is a large variance in flavors between nectar sources. I currently have a mead (technically a melomel) that has about 12 lbs of wildflower honey and 3 lbs of buckwheat honey which is pretty much jet black and smells/tastes like hay. After about 6 months, the buckwheat plus the Texas persimmons that I racked on top of have started to really blend and mellow. I still figure it will be another or two before its good.

I also have a very dry wildflower mead that is going on about 2 years now and the latest bottles we tried have been amazing compared to the earlier ones. Mead really needs time to come into its own. The braggots should show a lot more character after the initial strong flavors mellow.

 

[Adeering]

I just brewed a wheat braggot as an experiment 4 days ago, right now its way early to tell but the aroma isnt great, made a orange blossom honey wheat braggot with oranges in it as well. Hoping for a nice citrusy aroma and taste when its finished

 

[ghpeel]

Well this seals it. Ill be doing a Golden Promise Smash Braggot soon, with 10lb GP, EKG hops and enough honey to hit 1.080. And I'll be using Tupelo Honey from Apalachicola. Best honey in the world, I even prefer it to Orange Blossom.

Does anyone recommend adding the honey after primary fermentation, or just at the end of the boil? I'm leaning toward doing it after primary, and letting the secondary age for about 2 months before bottling.

 

[bronzdragon]

Generally speaking, I've found that citrus fruits aren't a good thing in fermentation. It has to do with the citric acid. I hope it comes out ok for you though, but the citric acid may kill the yeast.

As far as when to add the honey, I always add it about 10 min before flame out. It doesn't give it much time to boil off any of the flavors, but it is enough heat to kill anything that may be in there that I don't want, lol.

I learned early on, that the shorter the amount of time you boil the honey, the more flavor you'll get in the end. There are some mead makers that don't boil. But, with that said, there are lots of microrganisms in honey and I always feel safer having it boil just a bit.

cheers

~rc~

 

[Adeering]

It went crazy for the first 3 days it was in the primary, now there is no bubbles (but we know that doesnt neccesarily mean fermentation is done) but its already down to around 1.02 from 1.09 so gonna leave it in the primary for 3-4 weeks before racking to secondary and tasting

 

[Gothnet]

I made a braggot a few months ago and was very pleased with the results. It's definitely a big one though. 3.5kg amber extract, 2.5kg honey, hallertau hops, sweet orange peel. It had a gravity of 1.080, and then I added another kg of honey, so I don't exactly know where it ended up. Then I pitched a belgian beer yeast and left it to ferment for a couple of months.

No idea what gravity it finished at but after a few months in the bottle with another 300g of honey to prime it has a very strong, heady honey aroma, amazing body, tastes a little like a honied chimay blue and ... well, if you have more than one of an evening you're liable to wake up feeling like you've been hit by a bus.

I'm thinking about a quicker, quaffable braggot at the moment, but the strong one was a huge success.

 

[bubbachunk]

Technically for it to be a braggot at least 51% of sugars need to come from the honey.

As far as aging I would not expect any of them to be very drinkale under 3-4 months at 1.060 starting gravity. I have done some lower abv, sweet meads and had them drinkable in that time period. Stash these away and pull out a bottle every two months maybe, mead needs lots of time to mature, even when it is in a lower quantity.

 

[kellanv]

I would also say that putting honey at all into a boil will destroy a lot of the volatile compounds that give it complexity. Anything above 130 will in fact and some say lower than that. You will find that many mead makers rely on pitching a good amount of healthy yeast into the must as their way to prevent infection with little to no heating at all!