Brewing Beer with Honey
I emailed Mike a question yesterday and he responded with an answer. Here’s the correspondence:
Question: Do you think it would be nuts to use 2 pounds of honey in my Honey Wheat Ale recipe?
Answer: I brewed a honey ginger beer once several years ago, and it had close to 2lbs of honey in it. It was OK, but the ginger wasn’t very nice. It was a kit beer, and it was rather thin because of the huge amount of simple, bodiless sugar from the honey. But with all-grain you can fix that. Depends on when you add it. The later in the process you add it the more flavor you’ll retain. More importantly, the later you add it in the process, the better success you’ll have driving your final gravity to where you want it. If you add 2lbs to the boil, your FG may finish higher than expected. This is because the yeast will feast on the simple sugars from the honey first, then turn to the maltose. At which point, they will likely be tired out and the %ABV is already on the rise.
The best way to handle large amounts of simple sugars is to add them after about 4 days of primary. Let the yeast work away at the maltose, then give them simple sugars for dessert. This way you’ll still get a good FG.
The problem with honey will be getting it into a less viscous state to add to the primary. You can’t really add too much water to it because your volume limitations in the fermentor. Normally for Belgian styles requiring sugars (Tripel, Golden Strong) , you can get away with just a half quart to make a simple syrup with raw sugar. But honey is already pretty “volumous”.
I recommend adding 0.5-1.0lb in the boil, then diluting the second pound in enough water to get it easier to pour for primary.
You’d probably do well to make your base beer a 4 gallon batch at a higher gravity that expected, then add the honey and water mix to get the rest of the volume. For example, If you wanted a 5.5 gallon batch of 1.050 beer, I’d make 4.5 gallons of 1.061OG beer. Ferment that for 4-5days with a good healthy pitch of yeast (no 22oz starter, you’ll want a 1L starter), then pour in 1 gallon of your honey/water mix for a final 5.5 gallon batch. To anticipate to thin a body with 2lb of honey, I’d mash in a little high, say 155-156Fish.
on July 2nd, 2009 at 9:50 am
I love using honey - but adding it prior to fermentation just increases your OG and adds some dryness. Try using Honey Malt if yo uare looking for sweetness, but not more than 20% or so of the grain bill (depending on the strength you want). I’ve used both method and am a huge fan of honey malt. After primary is also good and you can even add it to the keg or bottle if you like.
on July 2nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Thanks Rob. I think your comment and Mike’s answer are pushing me towards using honey malt as my “honey” ingredient.
on July 13th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
A friend and I brewed a “honey brown” for my first home brew about 12 years ago. He was teaching me how to brew, and decided we should add some honey and do an experiment. We added about 4-5 lbs of honey, along with the standard amount of malt extract, which was about 7lbs or so. Well, the fermentation was extremely active and I even had hops glog the airlock and blow the lid off of my plastic fermentation bucket. That was a crash course in blow-off, literally. : ) The ale turned out okay after all, but it was incredibly strong, probably close to 10%. For flavor, the honey extract is your best bet thought, I didn’t notice much flavor from the honey in my brew, but did notice a dryness, as Rob mentioned. It was a killer brew though.
on October 7th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
A friend and I just recently brewed a Honey Pale Ale and added 2lbs. of honey just after the boil before adding to the primary. This resulted in a high abv and a dry taste to the finish of the beer. All together it was a great beer though, but I would reccomend adding the honey a few day after the primary fermentation has begun. It will allow for more of the hoeny flavor to come out in the beer and should not affect the gravity or abv nearly as much.