What is the worst ingredient you have ever added?

[ubnserved]

Candied Ginger. Put it in last years Christmas Ale. Just terrible. Won't ever touch that stuff again. Found it at Northern Brewer and thought "well this might be interesting

Well it was interesting right? Still doesn't sound good.

 

[ktblunden]

Alright. I see 2 guy here with chilies /peppers. What was the reason in the first place? (Love hot things, experiment, made it for cooking /recipes, etc) Would you do it again but change recipe?

Chiles can work very well in a beer. If you either balance flavors or design a beer to showcase the chile flavor and don't go overboard on heat you can end up with an excellent beer.

 

[Beernik]

I had an Anaheim chili beer at Wynkoop's in Denver many years ago. It was nice and refreshing, but vegetal. Not sure I'd want one gallon of it let alone 5 gallons.

 

[Natdavis777]

Hose water...

I was chilling the beer with an immersion chiller and my hose finally have out.... Nice, nasty hose water dripping into a bacterial paradise .... Yeah, it got infected


Sent from my iPhone using Home Brew

 

[Singletrack]

My chile beer was quite good. I like heat, and I like beer (duh), so it worked for me. It wasn't for everyone, so I drank almost all of it. However, it gave me heartburn every time. Worth it.

 

[ubnserved]

Chiles can work very well in a beer. If you either balance flavors or design a beer to showcase the chile flavor and don't go overboard on heat you can end up with an excellent beer.

So do you end up with a peppery taste like tequila or do you end up with a taste more like a sweet hoppy salsa?
I have always wanted to brew with agave but have never seen a thread about with outstanding results

 

[corcis]

Yeah.... I don't think I could put the Christmas tree in my beer. :cross: As a kid of 8 or so I was sent off by my mother (she was/is craaaaazzzzy) to live in a logging work camp in western Oregon. The constant smell of evergreen pitch on the hands and clothes made doing anything other than a Christmas tree a big no no for me.
I have only tried pumpkin ale maybe 2 times and wasn't impressed. We're you following a recipe or experimenting?

Tree beer is one of my favorite things. Kulshan Brewing is a local and they do it yearly - see here for a shot of the tree-in-the-kettle.

That said, I've used a number of the ingredients here (ginger, molasses, LME (very funny), and others) and not had a problem.

Probably the worst I've done is between a mead with city water and no Campden tablet (fermentation never really took off) or a mead with acid blend, which I had no idea how to use - added something like 2oz of it to 5g. Expensive, sad, depressing mistakes.

 

[ubnserved]

Griswald part is funny. ... that's what the wife calls the house every year around Christmas.
When I think of Christmas flavors tree is not one of them. .... more like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, apple pie and pumpkin pie.

 

[ubnserved]

Hose water...

I was chilling the beer with an immersion chiller and my hose finally have out.... Nice, nasty hose water dripping into a bacterial paradise .... Yeah, it got infected

Yeah I bet it was infected. I can remember telling my kids when they were little what a bad idea it was to drink out of a hose and how many times I had to repeat myself. You might as well go drink out of a mud puddle and the mud puddle won't have any of the chemicals leached out of the plastic hose. Mmmmm yummy! :cross:

 

[ubnserved]

My chile beer was quite good. I like heat, and I like beer (duh), so it worked for me. It wasn't for everyone, so I drank almost all of it. However, it gave me heartburn every time. Worth it.

Did you ever cook with it?

 

[drainbamage]

So do you end up with a peppery taste like tequila or do you end up with a taste more like a sweet hoppy salsa?
I have always wanted to brew with agave but have never seen a thread about with outstanding results

There are several factors that affect the difference between a slight chili pepper flavor and 5 gallons of napalm:

- Style of beer - the same amount of chilies will be much more noticeable in a blonde ale than an imperial stout.
- Type of pepper - obviously habaneros or ghost chilies are going to lend a lot more heat than milder types like Ancho or poblano.
- Seeds and membranes - less seeds/membranes = less heat
- When to add - boiling the chilies will provide more vegetal pepper flavor. Dry-hopping with the peppers usually just adds heat.

When I made a chocolate chili stout last year, I added 3 cayenne peppers (with about half of the seeds removed) in the last 15 minutes of the boil. Really hot chili beers just make me feel sick, so I wasn't going for a lot of heat. I ended up with just enough hint of peppery flavor in the background to make people ask "hey, what is that ingredient?" It went over pretty well.

 

[Singletrack]

Did you ever cook with it?

No, I would consider that a waste of good beer. ...but I'm a brewer who doesn't cook.

 

[JimRausch]

Pomegranate juice at bottling time. For some reason I thought my Irish Red wasn't red enough. I figured out the amount correctly so the carbonation level was fine, and she was a beautiful red color. But when the sugar is fermented you are left with a nasty bitter off-taste. Don't do it.
My 2nd brew ever was an extract wheat ale that I added 8oz. ground ginger root late boil. Way too much. It was not much of a beer, but there's still a few bottles hanging around because it makes a great stomach tonic( I also overcarbonated it)

 

[Maylar]

Not beer, but cider... concentrated cherry extract at bottling time. Just 1/2 TSP in a gallon was way too much. My brother said it tasted like WD-40.

Very leery now about adding flavors of any kind.

 

[ruralbrew]

Molasses. I only added 4-6 oz to a five gallon batch of Porter but once the sugars are fermented out the residual flavor was not at all what I was hoping for.

I also added some sucralose to a batch of graff to backsweeten it a bit. I overdid it and the result is way too sweet with a weird chemical taste in the background. Drinkabke but not palatable.

 

[Husher]

Oh I also added some black cherries and whatnot based on a recipe from a kit company's website. Supposedly turning a nut brown into a christmas ale. Total crap. had to dump.

 

[MrFeltimo]

My cell phone when it dropped out me breast pocket into my hot wort, didnt notice much of the flavour but it did pi$$ me off.

 

[Zekk]

I added pomegranate juice in secondary to a beer and it was awesome, and pink. Made the recipe again and added too much juice and it now tastes almost like a wine. Still good though.

I didn't add this ingredient, but in college I took a swig of my natty light only to find a friend had put out his cigarette in it. Only way to make a natty light worse I guess

 

[damlamb]

Rhubarb. Added to a hefe and it was seriously funky. Talked to some craft breweries that make rhubarb wheat and found out they only used about a 1/4 the ammount I did. I dumped most of the bottles after I choked back a few pints trying to tell myself it wasnt that bad. Most of the commercial versions also included strawberries in the recipe. One brew master told me he used 150# rhubard and 250# strawberries for a 20bbl batch.

 

[stu4stew]

Hose water is the best trading water around

 

[Jacob_Marley]

Added mint leaves to the secondary of some lemon wine (skeeter pee). Didn't so much taste the mint, but the wine ended up with an unpleasant vegetal taste ("grassy" in the wine world).
Thankfully it was only in a gallon test portion of a larger batch.