A while back, I bought Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers. It had a lot of great historic and unique recipes that I have been dying to try. One that really caught my eye was the Sarsaparilla Ale. With the spices of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, licorice, sarsaparilla, and coriander, the beer stuck a note with me as a great beer to have for spring or even let age for a bit.
Even though I haven't made it yet and tried what it could taste like, I decided to spruce this beer up. There were one notable problem right off of the bat, I'm okay with omitting hops from some of my recipes, but malt is a must and this recipe has none. So, I decided to substitute malt in for the required corn syrup. The rest of the ingredients I have had little to no experience with in brewing, so I did not want to go monkeying around with the levels. Once I brew and taste this, I am sure I will have some more input on where the flavors need to be, but as for now I will continue as planned.
There is one thing about this beer that has me extremely excited and it is something that I have been wanting to try for some time now, and that is to use honey in the beer, essentially making a Braggot. This has a late addition of honey so it should act towards aroma of the beer, giving it a much sweeter bouquet. Yeast that I will be using in this beer is still up in the air. I could go with either an ale or mead yeast, but since the fermentables will be a higher percentage malt, I feel that I should stick with an ale such as Scottish or American as suggested by WYeast. Perhaps I will even look into a saison yeast since there will be so many other flavors working here. Who knows...
I have all of my herbs ordered and on the way. Target brew date for this beer is 2/6/2011.
Primary: American Pale Ale
Secondary: Rye-rish Red Ale
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