Herb beers - ever brewed them?

[helenjp]

Looking speculatively at the wild mugwort nearby, I wondered what home-brewed herbal beers were like.

Has anybody made them? Tasted them? Seen them on sale?

Apart from mugwort, I've always been curious about nettle beer, but the only fermented beverage I've ever made was ginger beer.

How hard are herb beers to make? (Seriously, curiosity is going to kill me one of these days...).

The nearest thing I could find on this subforum was a reference to

heather ale.

[cdh]

Brewing an herbed beer won't be different in procedures from brewing a hopped beer... hops are an herb, after all. The tough part will be calculating how much bitterness your chosen herbs are going to give you, and how much of which herb will allow you to balance the sweetness of the malt you're using. I've never brewed a beer that wasn't bittered by hops... though things like sweet gale, coriander, orange peel, rose petals, chamomile, and other herbal goodies have gone into batches I've brewed.

If you were going to start brewing herbal beers, I'd start by making very small batches of a gallon or less to test the bittering balance you get from the herbs you want to try.

As a start, you might look to the old European style of pre-hop brewing, Gruit ales.

[helenjp]

Thank you for that advice - and one more question!

Is it possible to induce fermentation without yeast, by using meadowsweet, as mentioned in Grieve's Modern Herbal?

I'm thinking that this might produce only a modest fermentation, producing some type of "small beer".

A Herb Beer that needs no yeast is made from equal quantities of Meadowsweet, Betony, Agrimony and Raspberry leaves (2 oz. of each) boiled in 2 gallons of water for 15 minutes, strained, then 2 lb. of white sugar added and bottled when nearly cool.

[cdh]

Fermentation only happens through yeast. Your question is more about where the yeast come from, than what causes the fermentation.

Wild yeasts have an affinity for certain plants... orchards often harbor interesting wild yeasts, and your meadowsweet may be another plant with a yeast affinity. Going that route, you are taking a significant chance that unpleasant microbeasts will get into your beer and do undesirable things (like turning it into vinegar or worse). Sometimes wild yeast fermentations turn out very nicely... sometimes they don't. If you want to experiment with non-hops bittering, I'd limit the other variables and use a pure culture of yeast. I don't know about homebrew ingredient availability in Japan for you, but I do know of folks in Japan who do homebrew (though they talk of mail ordering ingredients from the US)...

IF I were you, I'd also use dried malt extract for my fermentables, and a very simple recipe, with the variability between batches coming solely from the herbs.

I'd start out with something like this:

Boil together:

1 lb dry light (or pale, or maybe even amber) malt extract

1 Gallon water

After the boil foams up, then add your herbs and allow to boil for 5 to 10 minutes. To start, I'd think of adding herbs in amounts of about 5-7 grams per gallon, and adjust from there based on how it turns out. Longer boiling times in modern recipes are an artifact of chemical properties of hops' bittering compounds... since you're using no hops, those rules don't apply to you.

[helenjp]

Thanks, that's excellent advice, especially for a beginner. I did know from sourdough that the "non-yeast" herbs must be carrying some kind of wild yeast, but as you say, that's one complication too many to start with.

I think I can find brewing supplies here, though to be legal in Japan, I would need to keep finished alcohol content below 1%.

[cdh]

IF 1% is your goal, then once your gallon ferments out, dilute it with 3 parts water. You might want to taste it at full strength before you do the dilution. It would be very very difficult to brew something that comes out to 1% without doing the dilution step.

Also, you should read over my eGCI homebrewing course so you have some firm grounding in brewing principles. I notice that there are lots of important steps I'm not telling you here, like: sanitize, ferment in a covered container, keep the temperature between 60 and 70F, don't add yeast before the liquid is below 80F, etc...

Edited March 25, 2008 by cdh (log)

[helenjp]

Excellent resources, thanks!

eGCI Homebrewing Classes

Q&A for the classes

I think I might print out the class, and write in the metric conversions, then start checking equipment and hunting for a kit...I have a few weeks before the herbs I want to use will be at the right stage.

As for finished alcohol content, lower is definitely better than higher for me and my DH - any particular recommendations for beers or ales below 5% alcohol?

[chappie]

What about rosemary used to flavor beer? I'm thinking this could be interesting. Not an overpowering amount, but enough to know it's there.

[helenjp]

I am sure rosemary would be excellent, and it's second on my list to try after mugwort. Since mugwort is a bitter, and rosemary is an aromatic, they may each need something else to balance them. I'm thinking of combining candidates in an extract (simmered 5-10 mins) first to see how they work together, and judge quantities.

Googling rosemary beer produced this handy small resource on brewing and herbs.

Mansgarden herb list

[cdh]

Excellent resources, thanks!

[...]

As for finished alcohol content, lower is definitely better than  higher for me and my DH - any particular recommendations for beers or ales below 5% alcohol?

←

Thanks... I'm glad the course is providing help and inspiration.

As to styles that finish low in alcohol and don't seem unbalanced:

British style- Ordinary bitters, mild ales

German style- Berliner weissbier

The Berliner weiss is often paired with herbal woodruff syrup... it ferments out to be very tart since the style includes an innoculation with lactic bacteria in addition to the yeast. Wyeast labs is currently offering a Berliner weiss yeast and bug blend, though it will be phased out very soon in favor of their next batch of specialty yeasts for the spring.

I am going to add that experimenting with wacky herbal flavors in a very low gravity beer is a likely recipe for disappointment. If there's no malt there to play off of, you're just going to end up with an herbal tea with a little fizz to it... which is much more easily accomplished with some hot water and a teapot, and a cold can of Lite beer... If you don't use a reasonable amount of malt it will be halfway between beer and tea, and likely not have the charm of either.

Edited March 26, 2008 by cdh (log)

[helenjp]

Thank you for the information on suitable styles. Your generous sharing of knowledge is a huge resource for me, living in Japan.

Wacky herbal flavors - I think that the herbs most often used with/for beermaking are pretty much established by history, and if you substitute, it would be with plants that are either related or have similar properties. For example, if I used my local mugwort, I would be considering the fact that it is less aromatic than European artemisias.

What I want eventually is to figure out how to make unhopped, herbed small beer or ale - the kind of not-very-alcoholic drink that was probably originally herbed to prevent spoilage as much as for flavor.

I'm curious about the use of flowering tops - they do carry wild yeast, and I think that must be because starch in buds metabolizes to sugars in the process of bud-break - and those sugars are a good environment for wild yeasts. That's even true of leaf-buds, though not to such a pronounced extent. I wonder what the optimum stage of bud-break/flowering is for brewing purposes?

[cdh]

Wacky herbal flavors - I think that the herbs most often used with/for beermaking are pretty much established by history, and if you substitute, it would be with plants that are either related or have similar properties. For example, if I used my local mugwort, I would be considering the fact that it is less aromatic than European artemisias.

←

I think that even hops don't perform as expected in a beer when there is nearly no malt flavor in the recipe. Mild ales in the british tradition treated the hops quite differently from other beermaking traditions... Here is a link to a recent discussion between a bunch of brewers on formulating a mild ale recipe. Hopefully it is not too opaque with brewers jargon. Actually, it might be fascinating to ask your question on that board and get a response from a quorum of clueful brewers of wacky and obscure stuff. I'm tempted to go over there and ask their thoughts on a project like yours. If you're up for it, I'll get the topic started by performing a little translation of what you want into brewer's jargon, and you can drop in to fill in the specifics. It's a no-register board, so minimal bureaucracy involved in getting involved over there.

[eje]

[...]

As a start, you might look to the old European style of pre-hop brewing, Gruit ales.

←

Roots Brewing in Portland makes a very nice heather ale, which I quite enjoyed the last time I was up there. The heather definitely gives it a different character than hopped beers. Sort of floral and refreshing.

More apropos of this discussion, I was out last night and noticed that the Magnolia Brewpub has a current seasonal ale called Weekapaug Gruit. With this discussion going on, there was no way I could not try a half of it last night.

It's a dark ale with some very interesting and tasty spice character. Complex stuff. I'm definitely going to try it again after reading more about Gruit to get a better handle on all the flavors going on.

[helenjp]

Apparently Kirin (Japanese brewery) made some gruit ale...just for research purposes . Looks to be quite different from the farmhouse type of small beer that I was thinking of.

Thanks for the description of tastes!

Thanks for the link, Christopher, as you say, the jargon is very specialized, but interesting reading all the same.

[cdh]

As you may have gleaned amongst the jargon on that thread on the Burgundian Babble Belt, the idea of a "mild" or "small" beer implies the existence of a strong, or a big beer. The concept of "small beer" is actually pulled from the lexicon of partigyle brewing.

That style of brewing is about taking one large batch of grain and making several different beers from it. First comes the big beer, a very strong barleywine type thing sometimes, that comes when the first quantity of water that the grains rested in is drained off. Next comes the small beer, which contains all the sugars from the grains that didn't dissolve into the big beer. The volumes of the big and the small beers are proportional to their strengths.

So, to make a small beer like you're imagining, you've got to make a big beer too... or just brew in the modern one-beer-per-batch style and mix all the runoff together into one beer of average strength... or you could use malt extract, which is much much easier for a beginner.

[suzilightning]

one of the vilest concoctions i have ever tasted was a caraway beer johnnybird brewed a few years ago <SHUDDER>.

[eje]

I did go back and try the Magnolia Weekapaug Gruit again.

Still like it. It's got a very nice sweet sage-like taste and smell.

In the interest of research I also stopped by an herb store to give a jar of mugwort a sniff.

Yep, that's the major flavor/smell in the beer.

[theisenm85]

I'm afraid I don't really have much to say about herbal brews...

Did wanna say that New Belgium Brewing just came out with their "Springboard Ale", which is flavored with a number of herbal type things. http://www.newbelgium.com/beers_springboard.php

However, they did use Mt. Hood hops. I'm assuming for bittering, but I suppose they might have gone a different way.

Haven't gotten to taste the beer or I might have a better idea. Just figured I'd post it up for a beer in this vein. Might be fun to clone, or at least steal some flavor profiles from.

Edited April 4, 2008 by theisenm85 (log)

[helenjp]

"mild" or "small" beer implies the existence of a strong, or a big beer

Now that makes better sense! Thank you!

give a jar of mugwort a sniff.

Thank you for your research! I did wonder if it was still used very much.

Please continue your research if you come across a yarrow beer, or a nettle beer!

[Vorlauf]

My first Egullet post! I have brewed a few beers using herbs before. Ground Ivy has been one of the more interesting. It has a long history in England, and seems to work well when added in the last 5 minutes or so of the boil. It isn't really bitter enough or in the right way to replace hops, and the one batch I did with just the ivy was interesting, but not great. However, used with hops in a lower bitterness style like a mild it is a refreshing taste akin to mint in some ways. It is also quite available in many unkempt lawns (Aka "Creeping Charlie).

Another herb is Gesho, which is an African buckthorn leaf. I used to work at a home brewing store (Northern Brewer) and we had a lot of Eritrean and Ethiopian customers who brewed "Suwa," a roasted corn and barley beer flavored entirely with this herb, which turns out to be available in most little grocery stores that cater to those cultures. I have tasted a bit of suwa and the related mead they called "miss", and it has the right sort of bitter character to balance the brew well. Both the beer and meads were on the sweet side and probably still slightly fermenting when served.