watermelon beer

[birds40]

I put a few watermelon plants in my garden this year and they are doing very well. Looks like I'm going to end up with about 10 watermelons. Since I am going to have this surplus of watermelon I thought maybe I could use a few to make some sort of beer. Has anyone ever heard of or drank a watermelon flavored beer?? Any thoughts on the style of beer I should use?

 

[ChshreCat]

I've been enjoying 21st Amendment's Hell or High Watermelon. It's a watermelon wheat.

If you do a search (use the google search option) you'll find a few different threads here by folks who have used watermelon in brewing.

 

[jfrank85]

http://www.austinhomebrew.com/product_info.php?cPath=178_21_93_94&products_id=12928

Throw some of these in the mix and you'll be fine.

 

[Zixxer10R]

How is that supposed to help the OP with his actual watermelon surplus?

 

[jfrank85]

Lol I dunno, he could smack them with mallets like Gallagher. I only looked at the title and skimmed the text my bad.

 

[permo]

make a nice 1.050 american wheat beer and add some of your watermelons to the fermenter after a few days. It would be tasty I am sure.

 

[birds40]

Thanks for all the posts. Those hops sound like they would go good with a watermelon beer.

I shouldn't add the watermelon during the boil?

 

[craig_reed]

I would definitely not add the watermelon to the boil. It will probably turn to some nasty mush.

Just my opinion though. Go with cubed watermelon in the secondary. I am going to go buy some stuff from my LHBS today to do a watermelon wheat. I will probably cut up about 1lb of watermelon (maybe more depending visually how much that is) and add it to my primary fermenter after 3 or 4 days.

 

[JeepDiver]

I did a blonde a couple of years ago and added the watermelon extract at bottling. Turned out real good. Biggest issue with using real watermelon I see would be the fact that you would end up with a lot of extra water for the amount of melon flavor. I would think you would want to do a partial boil, then make up the rest of the batch with the watermelon juice to get it to work out, without the beer being really thin.

 

[starrfish]

I sampled a home brewed watermelon american wheat a few years ago, made me throw up in my mouth a little. It did use too much watermelon extract flavoring which I thought was awful... I would think it would take a heck of a lot of real watermelon to have much flavor come through.

Flash back to 12 years ago to a party with watermelon margaritas using mezcal... woke up on the lawn holding the empty bottle of mezcal (missing the worm) but that's another story!

 

[birds40]

Craig let me know how it turns out. The watermelons need at least another month so I'm not going to be making mine for a while.

 

[Johnson9289]

I brewed a watermelon wheat last summer and learned a lot from our mistakes. I think you are going to need a lot more then a pound of watermelon, like another poster said it contributes a lot of water and little flavor. Do not boil the watermelon it turns into a weird sludge and alters the taste. The extract we tried was unpleasent and metallic.

I personally would brew your beer to a volume of three gallons and let it ferment in the primary, then add the watermelon juice to the secondary. We scooped five watermelons into a muslin bag and hand crushed the juice to a quanity of about two gallons and then topped our homebrew up to 5 gallons so it wasn't too watery. (We threw out the bag full of watermelon meat and kept only the juice). If you wanted to be more conservative you could try 4 gallons to 1 gallon of watermelon. If you are worried about sanitation consider using camden tablets in the watermelon juice the day before you add it to your fermenter. You could still put some melon cubes in a hop bag in the secondary but you probably wouldn't notice a taste difference.

21st Ammendment makes a solid watermelon beer if you want an example of a good one. I believe it is called "Hell or High Watermelon"