How to make honey beer at home?

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Of course, you can buy this foamy drink in any supermarket or even in a nearby stall. Also good beer - when it is alive, on tap, from a barrel. But even better: home-brewed, homemade honey beer. It has an authentic aftertaste with a slight bitterness, rich amber colors. For its preparation, two classic varieties of honey are best suited - flower and buckwheat. And they knew how to make honey beer in ancient times in different parts of the world. Mostly Polish and German recipes have come down to us. There were also secrets of making this drink in Russia.

A little about brewing technology

If you follow the rules, homemade honey beer should be amber in color, have a delicate floral aroma with a slight hint of hops. The drink is famous for its lush foam, bitter aftertaste. In general, the taste is difficult to compare with other types of beer: is it worth trying?

Immediately it should be noted that the technologies for preparing the drink differ from the classicm alt recipe. The brewing technique differs from traditional brewing in greater simplicity, since it does not require saccharification of m alt, which is not used at all in the recipe. This eliminates the need to keep narrow temperature regimes during the process. Let's set aside the dispute about whether such a drink without the participation of m alt can be considered beer. You can call the end product in the old fashioned way: "mead", and honey wort - "well-fed". By the way, the recipe described below was developed according to the technology proposed in the work on honey making, which was written by Professor Tsesielsky in 1906.

Recipe for honey beer. Ingredients

To prepare it, we need the following ingredients: a liter of flower honey (or buckwheat), a bucket of water (8 liters), 10 grams of hops (with an acidity of 4.5%), 5 grams of beer yeast (top fermentation).

Experienced tips

It is advisable to use freshly poured flower, buckwheat honey. The candied product should only be used by those who are confident in their brewing skills: it requires special handling and knowledge of the subtleties learned from one's own experience. And the amount of hops taken will depend on the bitterness that you want to get. If you have no brewing skills, then follow the recipe, and the bitterness will turn out to be slightly lower than average. We take only beer yeast, since baking and alcohol versions will produce mash instead of beer. In principle, top-fermenting yeast can be replaced with “grassroots”, but in this case, youyou will have to keep the temperature within a strict range of 5 to 16 degrees Celsius.

And in order not to infect the wort with foreign microbes, it is necessary to pre-sterilize all tools with containers with boiling water. It should be remembered that foreign microorganisms have a negative effect on the fermentation process. The taste of the drink itself can be adjusted by the honey chosen for preparation and the amount of hops used (increasing the dosage of this component will make you more bitter, and vice versa).

How to make honey beer at home: step one

The process itself is not that complicated and only requires patience and care. Water is poured into the container reserved for cooking (the same eight liters). It needs to be boiled, and only after that honey is introduced. The mixture is thoroughly mixed; as a result of manipulations, a homogeneous mass should be obtained. Its upper level is marked outside on the wall of the pan, and the actual brewing of beer begins. It will last a full hour, and the lid must be open while doing so. Do not forget to remove the foam: without these manipulations, your homemade honey beer will turn out to be cloudy, with a strange aftertaste, and besides, it can deteriorate very quickly. In principle, brewing beer at this stage is somewhat similar to brewing jam.

Stage two, intoxicating

In 60 minutes your honey beer will inevitably boil away. The volume must be supplemented with water, topping it up to the original (for this, a mark is made on the pan) level. Along with the addition of waterhops are added. The base for beer is well mixed, and the process continues for another 60 minutes. This time the foam is removed only in the first half hour.

Stage 3

The most important rule for making honey beer is to cool it down quickly after brewing. Moreover, the temperature of the drink should drop from 100 degrees to about 20. At home, cooling is easiest to ensure by immersing the pan in the snow if it is winter outside and you live in a private house. Or - in a pre-filled bath, where additionally thrown ice frozen in the freezer.

Last effort on the road to success

Then the honey beer at home is poured into a suitable fermentation vessel. For example, in a large glass bottle. In this case, the liquid must be carefully filtered. Several layers of sterile gauze are usually used as a filter. Yeast is poured into the vessel, the contents of the container are mixed, and it is tightly closed in a dark and warm room for a week. The temperature in the room all this time should not fall below 23-24 Celsius. It is also desirable to exclude the possibility of drafts.

Periodically, you will have to release gases generated during fermentation. If you don’t want to mess around with this (and in the early days you need to open the lid 5-6 times a day), take care to install a water seal. Experienced brewers claim that when using it, homemade honey beer has a more delicate, even taste, and its aroma is noticeably more pleasant and fragrant.

When covetedthe drink ferments to the desired state, it is bottled. In each of them, before pouring, you need to put honey at the rate of a teaspoon per liter of liquid. You should not drink beer right away: it still has to “ripen” in bottles. This usually takes 10 days to two weeks. You can also store the finished product indoors, unless the July heat is on the street. But if you provide beer with comfortable conditions (3-16 degrees above zero), then it is able to maintain its taste and degree conditions for up to six months.

Subtleties and nuances

Actually, practice is the best way to learn how to brew honey beer at home. Recipes are often supplemented with spices: cloves, cinnamon sticks, pepper. The amount of honey also correlates with taste. Someone likes sweeter, someone prefers bitterness. But some secrets must be kept sacred. In particular, do not add unboiled water in the second stage. However, if you are using bottled water, you can try not to run it through the kettle. Yet the recipes are focused on ancient realities. If you are sure of the purity of the added water, feel free to delete boiling from the list of manipulations.

If you are brewing homemade honey beer for the winter and all you have at your disposal is thickened honey, you can put it to work by dissolving it with a steam bath. Just make sure that its temperature is not higher than +60 Celsius. Hotter conditions will kill both the benefits of honey, and its taste and aroma.

Under fermentation, it is better to use darkglass container. Unfortunately, finding a 20-liter brown glass bottle is quite difficult. So homebrewers wrap the transparent container with dark rags or simply paint the outside. By the way, when setting beer for fermentation, at least 20% of the bottle should remain free. Otherwise, the beer will peroxide or knock out the cork over time, even a water seal will not save.

Benefits of honey beer

Knowing how to make honey beer is a must for anyone who likes to skip a cup or two on a Friday or weekend. And do not be lazy to cook it. Firstly, you get an environmentally friendly drink, which definitely does not contain preservatives, dyes and substitutes. Secondly, you get a beer that perfectly matches your idea of perfection - after all, you prepare it to your liking. Thirdly, homemade honey beer has a beneficial effect on the nervous system. And with an abundance of stressful situations in the modern world, such a relaxant will not seem superfluous to anyone. Fourthly, the divine drink normalizes and stimulates metabolic processes in the body, with which every second person on the planet has problems. Plus, sleep disturbances are eliminated (for which you need to thank the hop cones that participated in the process), and all sorts of colds are less likely to cling (this is already the responsibility of honey).

Of course, all this is true only when beer (including homemade and honey) is consumed in moderation, without fanaticism. Otherwise, they may startoverweight problems - "beer tummies" have already become an integral characteristic of modern man. Yes, and you can unlearn how to relax without a coveted intoxicating drink. On the other hand, if you drink exclusively homemade honey beer, you will not succeed in becoming an alcoholic. It is unlikely that you have the opportunity to cook it on an industrial scale (sometimes you also need to work). And the townspeople do not have many opportunities for storing finished beer. So brew beer to your heart's content and enjoy it at the most significant moments of your life. With such a drink, any vacation will become brighter and sweeter, and the holidays - more memorable and enjoyable. It is only important to follow the recipe and not abuse alcohol.