Dave's Bracket
Source: Dave Polaschek
Previously unpublished.
Ingredients:
- 6 lbs light clover honey
- 6 lbs light dry malt extract
- 1 oz Chinook hops (boil)
- 1.5 oz Saaz hops (finish)
- Edme Ale Yeast
- YeastLab Sweet Mead yeast (optional)
- 5-10 lbs light clover honey in reserve
Directions:
- Brew a standard light ale with dry malt extract and hops.
- Have honey in bottom of primary fermenter.
- Pour hot wort onto honey, stirring gently to dissolve honey in wort, but not so much as to aerate hot wort.
- Add cold water to make 5 gallons.
- When temperature reaches 80F, shake like the dickens and pitch ale yeast.
- Let ferment for a week.
- Rack into secondary fermenter
- Add 2 lbs of honey, dissolved in as little water as possible.
- Wait for fermentation to slow
- From this point on, a lot is going to depend on your fermentation conditions, and what you want for a finished product. The basic idea is to keep adding honey until the yeast have given up the ghost, and then add just enough more honey to sweeten to the desired level.
- Add honey, 2 lbs at a time, until the yeast are Just Plain Done. If your yeast poop out before you're done with them, add a different, more alcohol tolerant strain, but Edme Ale Yeast has multiple strains, it seems, and at least one of them is a real trouper.
- If a still beverage is desired, bottle.
- If a carbonated beverage is desired, there are a few possibilities:
- prime with about a pound of honey, and hope there's a little life left in the yeast.
- keg and force-carbonate (my method)
- bottle in 2-litre pop bottles, and force carbonate using “The Carbonater”
Notes:
- The final result I got had 12 lbs of honey and 6 lbs of malt extract in a five-gallon batch. There was little residual sweetness, since the yeast did finish off the last of the honey while in the keg (I had to vent pressure a few times – careful if you've bottled so you don't get glass grenades).
- Somewhere along the way, the brew picked up an anise aroma. I couldn't smell it in the honey, and it's certainly not an aroma that was present in any beer I've brewed before this. I think it might have been an artifact of the YeastLab yeast, or one of the strains present in the Edme Ale Yeast. If you've got an idea, drop me a note.
- For a high-alcohol brew, this was pretty appealing. The combination of a little bit of hop bite, with plenty of alcohol, and the mystery anise smell combined nicely. About the only thing I would change would be to hop a little more heavily, both for the boiling and finishing hops. Maybe an additional half-ounce at each stage.
- I wasn't really sure how strong this was going to end up being. I was trying to use the inexact methods that might well have been used in earlier times: “Keep putting in honey until it's done.” I was pleased with the results, though, and I was surprised at how long the ale yeast lasted before being killed by the rising alcohol level. The other thing I was experimenting with was keeping the sugar level from ever being too high at one time, thus the repeated additions of honey. Too much sugar in solution is hard on the yeast, so I avoided that.