Dandelion Bitter
Anybody ever brew with dandelion as a bittering agent????
that is one of my plans for the summer, my friends dad makes dandie wine so i figured why not? dandelion wine is awesome too.
I usually get a giant crop of Dandelions first thing come sring before I get motivated to go out and weed them out of the lawn. I despise "weed n feed" stuff so I just do it manually. I could just save a pound or so of leaves and dry them in the oven. Or would they be better used fresh??? I figure if the leaves are safe enough to use in salads then they can't be bad for you in a beer.
Are you planning on a full 5-6gal brew, or just a 1 gal experiment?
"Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale). Entire plant. All parts of the dandelion have been used in the production of ale. The leaves alone are used to brew dandelion ale. Dandelion provides a unique bitterness, which is increased if the sepals are not removed when the flowers are used. Simmer 1 gallon loosely packed flowers with sepals for 20 minutes per 5 gallons."
Taken from http://www.calferm.org/edu/misc/botanicals.htm
1g experiment batch.... More from there is it's worth it.
My mom made a dandelion wine when I was a kid and I helped her pick the flowers. It was a lot of flowers. The wine was awesome. Yep I got to taste it as a kid but only a sip. Being inexperienced at it she bottled the wine too soon and we had the "pleasure" of hearing fireworks in the pantry (I could hear pretty good back then). A few bottles survived the storage but had an "egg white" streaking look. But it was fine and tasted good to me.
I get lots of dandelions in the spring and fall and unlike a lot of people I don't see them as weeds as they are very nutritional and the entire plant as mentioned is edible.
I am going to make it a point to gather up enough dandelions this spring to make a batch of wine AND some beer to compare them and see which is better.
DC
If you toss the entire plant in there your beer might come out magenta... my mom used to make magenta dye out of dandelions when I was a kid (hippie mom)
None of the parts are toxic so as long as you dont have pesticides on them... and since you dont use the stuff, one assumes you won't.....
Let us know how it comes out, please. I am really interested in hearing about it.
Shall I call it Flower Power Dandelion Ale???????
brewskinewbski wrote:
Shall I call it Flower Power Dandelion Ale???????
That'd be awesome! And you gotta use these caps:
http://www.craftycaps.com/store/index.php?productID=66
and yes, they work on beer bottles... I got a bunch of assorted ones in my stocking for Xmas.