Sarsparilla Ale

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

Can a Great Sandwich Make a Good Beer?

Being from Western New York, there are a few regional delicacies that are ingrained in your blood: Buffalo style pizza, chicken wings, garbage plates, and who could forget beef on weck sandwiches. For those of you not familiar with beef on weck, it is a hot roast beef sandwich with a kaiser roll. The top of the roll is dipped in au jous and then in a mixture of salt and caraway seeds, and finally topped with horseradish sauce.

Let's be honest, how could I not try to make a beer out of these ingredients. Okay, so I won't actually use beef or salt in the recipe, but I feel that the horseradish and caraway will add some great spicy notes that are not normally featured in beers. Although I am not using beef, it could be nice to have a few cold cuts on hand while serving this beer.

As far as styles goes, this will definitely be 21A - Spiced, Herb or Vegetable beer. I want this beer to be full in body and plenty malty, so I am going to use Munich malt mixed with some two row as a base. I haven't decided if I should add some 60 L Crystal malt to give it a bit of color and a bit more body, or leave it as it is to be reminiscent of the kaiser roll. I haven't yet decided on if I will use hops in this beer or not. If I do, it will be a low alpha acid hop, mainly used for its preservative qualities rather than aroma. I am also still trying to determine which yeast strain would be the best to use. Right now, I am thinking about a Scottish Ale. Target alcohol around 7% since this would be less of a session beer and more of one to just sample.

Over the next week, or week and a half, I will be working on recipe development. Target brew date for this ale will be 1/23/2011. If anyone has any thoughts on this beer, such as hops or yeasts to use, please feel free to offer suggestions.

Primary: American Pale Ale

Secondary: Rye-rish Red Ale