Honey Stout ?

[geoffclifton]

Just because I can I bought some honey at the markets yesterday and put down a honey stout.

Coopers Stout
500g Morgans liquid dark crystal malt
500g Stingybark honey
1Kg BE1

I reckon this one will be good by spring, ie 3-6 months but a couple of ?'s please.

Using BrewCalc there is no honey option. Is is OK to rate it the same as for liquid malt?

If so I've got a BC of 1059/1009 (on 24L) 6.3%. Something not based on science and knowledge suggests I would get a higher FG and a very sweet drop that needs to mature a while.

Re priming. Should I back off on the priming sugar. I generally go 8-10 grams/liter as I do like well carbed beers but maybe I should back off on a honey brew?

The brew btw has seriously taken off after 12 hours (kit yeast dry sprinkled). It just blasted the water out of the air lock and I expect some foam to follow so I shot down to the hardware and replaced the airlocks (3 as I made a few happy brews yesterday) with a meter of 8mm polytube which I shoved into the grommet and into a glass of water. The sound effects from two fermenters going nuts in one fridge is awesome

Oh and I ran the fridgemates in cooling to pull the wort down from 25* pitching temp to 21* over 4 hours then swapped them to heat on an 18* set point. They've just sat at 22* today with the door ajar but seem so happy I'll let them be.

Your thoughts appreciated.

Cheers, Geoff.

[Emo]

Have you made a honey stout before? If so, what was it like?
I'm far from an expert but I'm pretty sure that honey doesn't ferment in the brew so you can't add it in as a fermentable. It does however add a great flavour to alot of different beers.

[KEG]

honey does indeed ferment, but not completely. still, it won't add much sweetness at all. should be good

[rwh]

Honey is almost 100% fermentable. It adds dryness, but also subtle honey overtones. Be warned that it does not add any sweetness at all; to get sweetness in a honey brew it needs to be supported by other things like crystal grains.

As for its contribution to the OG, that's a tricky one; there's no way to know what proportion of the honey is water. According to wikipedia, it's somewhere around 17%, which is similar to liquid malt so that's probably a good approximation.

[geoffclifton]

Thanks RWH, we can always rely on you for some science.

Your comments add up nicely for me and I'm looking forward to a nice brew with this one. The liquid malt and BE1 should add the sweets you mentioned.

I presume that I can stay with 8g/L for priming?

Have you made a honey brew yourself? I recall an earlier post suggesting that honey should be used in small doses but With a dark malt stout I was prepared to experiment with the 500g.

Cheers, Geoff.

[rwh]

I've done several honey brews, most often "Wassa's Honey Porter", but also "Dogger's Honey Maple". Both are great recipes, and both use 500g of honey. I'm also planning to do a Beez Neez clone soon; I'll let you know how it goes.

Your recipe to me sounds quite dry, but I think that that will actually be a good thing. A nice dry, complex stout.

[gremlin]

So i decided to use some (very dark) stringybark honey my beekeeping father had sitting in his shed. Being the lazy prick that i am, and not having a saucepan big enough, i decided that i didn't need to heat the honey up with a little water to 70C.

The day after pitching the yeast i had about 4 inches of foam sitting on top of the brew which i thought was odd considering it was the slow yeast from a cascade kit. Perhaps it had something more to do with the fact i put about 3kg of honey in it (OG of 1056)... Or perhaps the honey had some wild yeast/bacteria in it?
About 4 days later this layer of foamy stuff disappeared... either sank or dissipated i'm not quite sure.

Currently i have about 23L of sour tasting crap sitting in one of my fermenters... perhaps i'll tip it out on the lawn?

[rwh]

Sounds like there was more than wild yeast in that honey, like some kind of acetobacter or something. Lawn sounds like the best place for it if it really does taste sour. Sorry.

[Pale_Ale]

I suspect the honey is responsible as it wasn't boiled.

A costly lesson, but a lesson learned nonetheless.

[FazerPete]

Sounds like there was more than wild yeast in that honey, like some kind of acetobacter or something. Lawn sounds like the best place for it if it really does taste sour. Sorry.

I would be surprised if it's acetobacter because honey is antibacterial.
http://www.worldwidewounds.com/2001/nov ... agent.html
It slowly releases hydrogen peroxide which kills most bacteria and can often kill the yeast in the quantities that gremlin used. That's the reason you have boil it because boiled honey loses these properties. It's nothing really to do with killing bugs.

[geoffclifton]

Sheesh !!

Ok I DID bring the BE1 & honey to the boil. As soon as the bubbles were steady, flamed out and stirred in the stout kit. I trust that would be enuff, like I was going not for sterilization or hot break.

48 hour update. Huge krausen has topped out a 30 liter fermenter but the volcanic activity appears to have peaked. Blow off hoses rule, I'll swap back to airlocks next week just to keep an eye on pressure.

My 60L LGP (let's get pissed fermenter took 36 hous to fire up where both the 30L boutique fermenters were away in 4-12 hours. Does the yeast take longer to count the sugars in a double size brew ?

LGP is (this brew)
2 x Coopers Draught kits
1.5Kg liquid pale malt
2 Kg Dex
BC 1052/1009 6.3%
A damn fine drink at 3 weeks in the bottle.

Cheers, Geoff.

[chris.]

I presume that I can stay with 8g/L for priming?

Too high IMO Geoff. I'd halve that for a stout (Especially if your planning on aging it). A lower carbonation will give it a smoother mouth feel.

[morgs]

So i decided to use some (very dark) stringybark honey my beekeeping father had sitting in his shed. Being the lazy prick that i am, and not having a saucepan big enough, i decided that i didn't need to heat the honey up with a little water to 70C.

The day after pitching the yeast i had about 4 inches of foam sitting on top of the brew which i thought was odd considering it was the slow yeast from a cascade kit. Perhaps it had something more to do with the fact i put about 3kg of honey in it (OG of 1056)... Or perhaps the honey had some wild yeast/bacteria in it?
About 4 days later this layer of foamy stuff disappeared... either sank or dissipated i'm not quite sure.

Currently i have about 23L of sour tasting crap sitting in one of my fermenters... perhaps i'll tip it out on the lawn?

Sounds like krausen to me , 3kg of honey is a lot. However unless you are ben.d, drinking your beer out of the fermentor doesn't taste as good as when it is carbed and chilled to the right levels. Let it brew out and bottle when safe.

[gremlin]

Hmmmm....
I'll give it a few more days and see what happens... i'm still learning.

Another thing i noticed with using so much honey was that it attracted some sort of tiny fruit fly (like you see on old bananas). Which would die and end up floating in the airlock. Using gin instead of water seemed to do the trick.

[FazerPete]

Hmmmm....
Another thing i noticed with using so much honey was that it attracted some sort of tiny fruit fly (like you see on old bananas).

Ah now it makes sense.

I'd bet money that the little flies are vinegar flies and your brew is now infected with acetobacter. You said that you did boil the honey which would have killed its antibacterial properties.

I hate to tell you this but I'm pretty sure that you've just made a very large batch of vinegar.

[geoffclifton]

The honey stout is in bottles.

Fermented furiously for 6 days and then slowed for 2 and was still for 4.
I never took an OG but FG was 1016. BC had predicted 1059/1009 so it finished a fair bit higher, and a tad higher than I prefer to bottle at.
Primed 8g/L and put away for at least a month. I'll let you know.

Today I'm going to do a honey extreme just for the hell of it and to confirm RWH's info that honey produces a dry finish and is not sweet as would be expected. I'll do a Canadian Blonde on 1Kg honey and 1Kg BE2.

Cheers, Geoff.

[buscador]

that thing'll taste like champagne

i did the same thing with a blonde canadian coopers with only 400 g of honey and the thing was so dry it hardly quenched my thirst,

hope this one comes out good, you may be able to use it as liquid sandpaper though

go for iit and let me know how goes!!

b

did you hop at all?

[wildschwein]

The truth is that yeast adores honey.

I've never used honey in beer but I have a fairly long backgound in the food industry and have had alot to do with bread and other yeast goods. Okay, baker's yeast strains are not the same as what we use as brewers (unless you do homebrand kits) but I have always observed that breads, pizza doughs and other yeast products absolutely go nuts when you put even a small amount of honey in them, even at cooler temperatures. More so than just straight sugars like sucrose and particularly more so than maltose (takes a long time for the yeast to attenuate).

Why is it so? It must be that honey is a form of sugar that is very acceptable, or preferable, to yeasts. I assume that it follows for beer yeasts too, which would explain the hyperactiveness of your honey stout ferment. The violent ferment doesn't necassairly signify a bacterial or wild yeast infection, rather its probably just the yeast going nuts over the "high GI" sugars.

[ryan]

Homebrand kits use bakers yeast?
I didn`t know that?

[geoffclifton]

Thanks wildschwein, good to wee you here.

I put down this fortnights 4 brews yesterday arvo. The honey blonde was bubbling in just 2 hours. As you said, yeast loves honey, how much it loves a kilo of it shall been seen (tasted) in about 8 weeks.

Brew 2, a blonde on pale malt and dex, was up and away this morning so say 12 hours for that one and the 45L batch of draught on pale malt, BE1 and dex (3Kg) hasn't woken up yet. It took 36 hours last brew. I still get great pleasure from seeing a fermenter start blowing bubbles

I'm now a definate fan of blow off hoses into jars in lieu of air locks. A good blast can't blow all the water out and if a brew pumps foam it doesn't make a sticky mess of the fermenter lid. Also drilled holes in the backs of the fridges yesterday to bring the probe and heater wires in rather than just squashing them in the door seals. I must find the camera and get aapt's ftp to work so I can put up a pic of the brewery.

Cheers, Geoff.