Appalachian True Root Beer
A hopped alcoholic root beer with mostly wild-harvested roots and herbs and a bock-ish grain bill.
experimental beers with a botanical twist
Recipes
Elderberry Wheat Beer
Since I’d made elderflower wheat beer at the beginning of the summer, I had to make elderberry wheat beer from the same backyard tree at the end of the summer.
Ginger-Angelica Gruit Porter
Fennel, licorice, lemon balm, coriander… YUM. A delicious backdrop to a delicious beer.
Elderflower Wheat Beer
A Belgian-style wheat beer with elderflowers from the back garden tree in London.
Sweetfern Chamomile Gruit Ale
My first new experiment worth writing up since last year’s Pennsylvania Native Plant Gruit Beer, where I first tried brewing with sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina) in a big way. This time I combined it with some other reliable brewing herbs for a trans-Atlantic gruit.
Pennsylvania Native Plant Gruit Beer
A malt-forward, porter-like beer with a nicely balanced blend of root-beerish flavors
Brewing with red raspberries: two approaches
Red raspberry imperial mugwort stout and raspberry-black currant wheat beer.
Alcoholic root beer, Prohibition-style
A light, refreshing, warming beverage with a very well-balanced flavor profile. Does it taste like root beer? Not really; there’s nothing caramelly about it. More like a spiced pilsner.
Meadowsweet, Heather and Gentian Gruit
This was my other stand-out beer of the winter 2014-15 brewing season. The idea was to make a vaguely Neolithic-style ale inspired by archaeological findings in Britain.
Fugwort Stout (A.K.A. Muggle Stout)
This was one of my two most successful experiments of the winter brewing season, and the first I’ve used hops in fifteen years. I wanted to make it basically because the portmanteaus amused me, but as it happened, mugwort and Fuggles hops go together in more ways than just linguistically.
Dark Lager with Mugwort
An unhopped lager. The herbs are assertive but not overpowering, and the bitterness is fairly low.
