Once you feel you have mastered All Grain brewing, using additions is a great way to advance your brew and introduce new elements and flavours. But much like ice cream it’s still essential to get your base correct before adding your rocky road or raspberry ripple. I have a couple of trusty base recipes for APA, IPA and pilsner which I use when experimenting with additions. Once I smash it, I then play around with the grain bill to tweak and perfect the recipe.
Additions come in all shapes and sizes and can be added throughout the mash, boil, fermentation, and conditioning stages with nearly unlimited possibilities. The choice is as extensive as your taste buds. A wide range can be foraged from your garden or hedgerows, purchased in the supermarket or manufactured in a lab.
When to add your additions
Like hops, additions used at different stages will give you different flavours, aromas and bittering. For example, adding orange peel to the boil vs the conditioning stage will bring different aromas and flavours. Orange peel added during the boil will produce a deeper, more intense bitter flavour while adding orange peel during conditioning will provide a lighter result with more aroma.
What additions to use
The obvious rule is to not add something you wouldn’t normally want to eat or drink. And consider what brew you’re making. Lagers and IPAs tend to match well with citrus, fruit, light herbs and spices. Unlike lagers and IPAs, where you want your addition to sit nicely in the background, APAs can handle more intense flavourings. Stout and porter can handle even more. Your grain bill will also bring its own unique qualities so bear this in mind when picking your additions – think what would complement or enhance it.
So what additions are available and what to buy?
The best place to start is a good online brew store or shop with a wide range of goodies for you to try. As mentioned before I would perhaps emulate something you’ve enjoyed in your local taphouse: perhaps tropical fruit in an IPA, or citrus in a cool pilsner or lager. Vanilla, chocolate, and coffee work well for a stout; spices like cinnamon, cardamom and star anise all work well for a festive brew.
Coriander is another popular addition especially in European brews from Germany and Belgium. I’m a huge fan of using peel in the boil: grapefruit, lemon and orange work great in an APA as it provides a fantastic deep flavour.
Our article on Yellow Belly Stout showcases this ingenious brew with its distinctive peanut butter and biscuit flavour achieved without actually containing peanuts, peanut butter or biscuits. Most clone recipes for this brew don’t attempt to tackle the, what I can imagine, very complex grain bill and instead use plain ol’ peanut butter.
What to look out for
Once you start using additions it can be easy to get carried away, so take as much care selecting your additions as you do making your beer. A lot of additions can really pack a punch and need a delicate touch to avoid overpowering the brew. I’ve also heard about a lot of fails when using artificial flavourings – these can easily be too strong and, unsurprisingly, bring an artificial taste to your pint. But saying that, a lot of people do like strong ‘fake’ flavours. Guinness and black, for example, really rocks some people’s boat.
What to experiment with
Back in the day, beer was made in barrels. To replicate this traditional flavour you can buy, or make, wood additions like oak to add to the secondary fermentation. You can even buy oak cubes made from old whisky barrels to introduce a unique quality to your brew.
Recently, we were lucky enough to go on a foraging walk with bearded brewer Stuart Woodman of Woodman’s Wild Ales, who does amazing things with foraged additions and wild yeasts. There are many surprising plants you can find in your garden to add to your next brew. The common dandelion root is a good caffeine-free coffee substitute for stouts and porters. Pineapple weed offers an amazing pineapple aroma and, of course, blackberries are plentiful in the hedgerows come Autumn, and work well in a good strong stout.
Made a brew with interesting additions? We would love to hear about it! Email us at mashed@darkfarm.co.uk or tag us on social media @darkfarmhops