Bottled and waiting...

[S.F.B.]

I bottled up the buckwheat honey brown ale today. All went really smooth. Hardly a drop spilled. :cool: Now the wait begins. I'm going to wait at least 3 weeks before cracking the first one open. Well, I'm going to try to wait that long.

This experiment has gone well. The flavors have blended nicely. The buckwheat honey is the prominent flavor. I am looking forward to tasting the first one after conditioning.

[Tweek]

howd you get left over honey flavor? I would be interested in knowing your method on this one.

[ray m]

I'd like to know that, too, SFB (or anyone else that knows how to get that nice, sweetish honey flavor in a brew). I plan on brewing a honey steam this winter and would also like some pointers on what to do with the honey so some of its smooth flavors are retained in the finished brew. Glad to hear your brew turned out good, by the way!:)

[Beerconnoisseur]

I brewed a Honey Pale not too long ago. For extract brewers, you substitute honey for some of the extract; for all-grain I would guess that the honey could replace some of the base malt, but be added during the boil, so the final beer is not too alcoholic. There is also a Honey barley, under specialty malts at MoreBeer.

I know the later in the boil that you add the honey, the more flavor is retained. You could also do an extended boil, which will redissolve some of the protein, resulting in a very smooth final beer.

[toneyc]

A couple of weeks ago I found a couple of bottles of honey wheat that a friend brewed and bottled in August of 2002. They had been in the fridge for a whole year and I wondered if they would still be good. They were fantastic! Really smooth and the honey flavor was very forward.

:)
Toney.

[sallad]

i've made 3 brews with honey, 2 of them i used 1/2 cup of honey as priming sugar. these are the 2 that had the best honey flavor; very smooth and full bodied, sweet and creamy. just allow an extra week or 2 for full carbonation. in the boil, i used about 1 lb honey and 4-5.5 lbs extract syrup, plus one had some crystal malt.

[Tweek]

I just made a lager with honey. I used 6 lbs of honey and it all fermented out. I cant taste it a bit :(

I have since learned about a honey malt that is supposed to impart a honey flavor, they say to use it in less than 10% or it can become to harsh of a flavor. So I will probabally give that a try at some point.

[Fast_Eddy]

Originally posted by Tweek
I just made a lager with honey. I used 6 lbs of honey and it all fermented out. I cant taste it a bit :(


Could be because lager yeast have the ability to consume sugars that ale yeasts do not.

[S.F.B.]

Originally posted by Tweek
howd you get left over honey flavor? I would be interested in knowing your method on this one.

I added the honey in the last 15 minutes of the boil. This allowed for some of the aromatic qualities to remain. The fact that buckwheat honey has a very strong flavor also allowed the taste to come through. I was surprised myself by how much it remained in the front of the profile. I only used 2.25 pounds of it.

[Tweek]

interesting. I did the same thing. The lager vs ale yeast question is an interesting one and I suppose possible, however I would probabally tend to lean more towards the properties of the honey, perhaps the buckwheat has enough "impurities" in it to leave a taste behind where the honey I used was to subtle. Still trying to find tonza fest, that was the best honey note beer I have ever had.

[Beerconnoisseur]

It also helps to use a less attenuative yeast strain, like White Labs English ale yeast, so all the sugars are not consumed.

[Tweek]

yeah I thought about cutting the ferment short, but I want to bottle it,so i needed viable yeast come bottling.