Honey, in all it's sweetness

[Wildcard]

Hey all,

I'm looking for some advice. I've been over the site a bit and I apologize in advance if this question has an answer among the other posts. I'm new to brewing, been at this for maybe 6 months tops. I've gotten into altering the Festa Brew kits to feed my curiosity as I'm waiting to get all the gear needed to start all grain. I have a brown ale on right now, pitched yesterday. I'm hoping to add honey to this to attempt a sudo honey brown. I've been reading every where I can about honey. How it's safe as is but when the water content goes up it awakens the other hidden aspects of it, wild yeasts, bacteria, etc.

I have honey from my grand father who has a few hives on his land for his gardens. It's unpasteurized which leads me to my question. I know boiling honey ruins it, removes all the awesome points I want to add to my ale. Can anyone provide me with advice on pasteurizing it without a boil (I've read about baking it in a sealed sauce pan), and also advice on adding it (not as a priming sugar or during flame out)? I'm curious what everyone's experience with it is and if it's even worth the time to try.

For notes, I only use a primary vessel unless I dry hop or add other flavours. I was going to add the honey on day 3 or so when the krausen dropped but on the same yeast cake so the yeast in there can help clean things up.

Thanks in advance for any advice and reading!

Cheers all.

[mr x]

AFAIAC, and most others as well, honey is a total waste in beer. I've used it before, and unless you were up around 30% in a lighter beer, I don't think you'd notice it. It just ferments out. When i used it, I warmed it enough to make it liquid, and that was it. It's a time/temperature thing to kill bugs, so you may be able to pasteurize it at 140f for 30 minutes....??? maybe, but that's a pure guess....

[sleepyjamie]

better off using honey malt. but then you'd have to go all-grain.

[LiverDance]

I've liked my use of honey in beers and I always says there is only one way to find out . Since you're doing a kit you should try adding it after fermentation dies down, the honey will cause more fermentation so don't get worried about that when you see it. As far as pasteurizing it i'm not sure, X's ideas of heating it up for a bit then adding it sounds good. The alcohol in your beer will also help to protect against bugs and such.

[LeafMan66_67]

I did the same Festa Brown kit about a year ago - racked onto 700g of unpasteurized honey from Noble Grape in the secondary. I only warmed it enough to make it viscous enough to get it into the carboy. As X said, it fermented right out. May be a bit detectable, but not a hell of a lot. Beer turned out good, and was even better after a few months in the bottles. I still have some bottles and still enjoy it.

[Jimmy]

better off using honey malt. but then you'd have to go all-grain.

Could you do a steep of the honey malt and then a short boil to sanitize it?

[spears104]

I tried using honey before, and like above, it just completely fermented out. Why not try making mead instead?

[Ladd]

To pasteurize it you can warm it up (I was told by my brother that works for a honey processor not to go over 50°C) and mix it with a bit of water and throw a crushed Campden tablet in (typical use is one crushed Campden tablet per gallon). Stir it up and let it sit over night. Then rack your beer onto it. As most have mentioned, unless you are using a lot, it mainly ferments out. You could continue to add it until your yeast has maxed out due to the alcohol content at which point it will sweeten your beer and give you that honey flavor. Just my 2 cents.

[adams81]

My friend this this with the Brown ale from Festa brew. I believe he had about a pound and a half in it, added in the primary. The final product had a very mild honey flavour, and the alcohol percentage was around 6.5%.

Sent from my GT-I9000

[HappyHopper]

better off using honey malt. but then you'd have to go all-grain.

Could you do a steep of the honey malt and then a short boil to sanitize it?

Ya you can do a 20 min steep on that grain, you do need to do all grain to use the honey malt... Like X said you need a ton of honey to know its there, you might consider useing both honey malt and honey but even at that honey in beer is more novelty than practical..

[rhumbatron]

I have been making honey lager for 20yrs now. I keep bees, so use unpasteurised honey at the rate of 500ml max to 10glns(imperial) wort (I can taste the honey even at 250ml/10glns). I gently heat the honey in a pot and add it at the very end of the boil & stir well. Pays to stir in the honey during cooling too.
cheers
ken

[Wildcard]

Thanks for all the responses! I don't have the gear yet to re-heat and add to the kit. Once I have the gear I think kits will fall to my urge to do all grain.

This being said I did find a link on honey from here (see page 3). They recommend warming the honey in the container so it's easier to poor. Then heating up a oven ready sauce pan to 176C, I did 175 as the off number isn't going to happen. I sealed off the sauce pan to help void escaping tastes and such. Left it there for 2 hours. Granted it this isn't to the letter but it's just my hopes of voiding ruining the batch and I like experimenting.

To get it right for adding to the beer I mixed the same volume of water with the same volume of honey. I had in weight 1 even pound of honey. This came to 327ml of honey after doing the above with the sauce pan. So I mixed that much distilled water with the honey and stirred. Then added the result to the graduated cylinder to check gravity. SG was 1.051 I hit 1.050 after mixing everything together and adding a bit more water to level things out. I had to warm the honey a bit to get it to 21C. Then I added it on high krausen (day 2).

Seems ok so far, I can smell some honey, not much really but some. I'm hoping after bottling it will show some foot prints on finish, if not it's ok, honey was free and it was fun. I'm hoping to bottle this batch with brown sugar.

[Graham.C]

With meads I don't pasteurize and haven't run into problems... Yet.

[Juniper Hill]

With meads I don't pasteurize and haven't run into problems... Yet.

1+ I alway use the no heat method for meads - supposed to preserve the honey aromas. I've never had mead go off.

[Wildcard]

My understanding that this is possible is that due to the ABV of a mead. It kills the sleeping possibly negative bacteria that can ruin the batch. With beer, unless it's a doppelbock or another 10%+ ABV beer that you can run a higher risk of a bad batch. I remember reading something on a home brew forum. I cannot recall which given the amount of scouring I've been doing.

I have to say that the amount of gray are around honey and beer is rather large and up for experiment. While meads reign king for obvious reasons. Though it seems easier to add honey on flame out then it does during high Krausen as mentioned above by rhumbatron.