Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Eating and Drinking => Homebrew => Topic started by: plot on September 29, 2008, 16:59
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Hello,
Recently purchased a Young's starter kit (bitter) and want some advice on a first brew attempt.
Planning to add at least one ingredient to the basic kit. Current candiates are vanilla (bottled extract) and ginger (crystallised), both chosen as they are already available in the kitchen cupboard.
Would welcome advise as to whether these ingredients would be suitable and how I should utilise.
Any other recipes ideas welcomed.
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Was dragged to a beer festival a few years back. Think they had a ginger flavoured beer, I tried it. Basically DISGUSTING.
No idea about vanilla., would guess the vanilla will be lost in the bitter.
The popular one there was the Raspberry Beer. Damn it was nice.
No idea how it was produced, probably a bit more complex then add raspberry flavouring to beer. For a real beer event everyone liked it.
Suggest that you investigate a bit first (books/google) and I would say that a Youngs bitter starter kit is not the ideal kicking off point. May be best to simply make bitter out of it and see how it goes.
The ones I tried were made from the individual ingredients.
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think you're right. Though I might try adding some flavour when it's bottled - replace the sugar with some of the ginger in half a dozen bottles.
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Hi, i used to use malt extract, improved body and flavour.
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I quite like the Blandford Fly that Badger beers sell - it's a not very hoppy medium ale, with a little ginger. I think a little ginger would really pep up a slightly bland kit beer.
The only raspberry beer I know of is a Belgian lambic beer: basically, a sort of lager flavoured with fruit juice (traditionally sour cherry, but raspberry is a very nice modern innovation) and lots of hops that gets brewed by a very slow fermentation with a really complex culture of wild yeasts and bacteria (I think some samples have 70 or 80 different species in the culture). Not readily achievable at home, I think.