Grainfather and cannabeer?

My advice is to not make a marijuana infused beer. It is not an efficient use of the plant.

Make your chocolate stout and smoke a j, vape, or eat some pot brownies.

 

What if efficiency is not a concern here? What if he has an abundance of product?

 

Then you can make a tincture with alcohol and add it to your beer. That seems to be the consensus as to the best way to add it. That said, making "weed beer" is, at best, sophomoric. Especially when that's your only motivation in learning how to brew beer.

 

Couldn't agree with you more.

 

but, maybe something like this...https://www.newbelgium.com/beer/the-hemperor-hpa/
If you are looking for flavor and not the THC specifically

 

Terpene oil is what brewers recently starting using to infuse in beers for cannabis aroma and flavor.

 

In that case, make an insane barleywine, heavily hopped throughout the boil. Use a lot of sugar to up ABV. After fermentation has ended, rack beer onto weed for secondary. Let it sit for a month. Add really potent hops for dry hop to try to cover up vegetal taste.
It'll still probably suck.

 

I'm somewhere where this is perfectly legal. THC is not water soluble and so it would be sorta pointless to put the weed in the grainfather at all. You would brew a beer as normal, then add in the weed or weed tincture as an additive later in the fermentation process. Because of the solubility and activation (it needs to be activated with heat) issues, the extraction of any high-inducing stuff will be very minimal.

If your goal is to use your newly legal homegrown crop with your homebrewed beer or have beer that makes you high... here is what I suggest.

Smoke the weed, taking a sizable hit. Then, before exhaling, drink your favorite beer. Once you've had a nice sip, exhale the smoke. If you also take a shot of some spirit before exhaling, this is referred to as 'the knockout'. This achieves almost all of the goals of a weed beer with much better flavor and efficiency. And it will definitely work, the other ways like the vodka tincture, I expect benefit mostly from the placebo effect.

 

First of all, nobody mentioned vodka. Secondly, and probably most importantly, your expectations related to alcohol tinctures are incorrect.

https://www.alchimiaweb.com/blogen/cannabis-extractions-alcohol/

 

It's definitely possible. There are cannabis sodas. For example, a 12 oz ginger one had 50mg. Saw it in the news. They say you can taste the weed resin in the aftertaste, kind of like hops I guess. I think it's somehow fused with the co2 IIRC.

 

Sorry I assumed when you mentioned alcohol you were referring to the (probably ineffective) process I've seen outlined over the years when people talk weed beer-- soaking weed in vodka like a vanilla bean.

Interesting article, but are you suggesting adding concentrate to beer? That is not a tincture. I don't think it dissolves in anything cold. My guess is it would sink to the bottom. Have you had experience to the contrary?

FWIW I do know this does work for warm drinks like tea.

 

Why is it not a tincture? Anything dissolved in alcohol is referred to as such, and since THC is soluble in ethanol, it certainly will work and work at room temperature. Or you could use the freezer method that they use in the article.

 

The reason I said it isn't a tincture is because the ethanol is removed from the concentrate and the result is a very sticky solid. I guess its semantics but I think of a tincture as a liquid. My question with temperature wasn't about the extraction, it was about when that sticky solid is added to the beer. It is sort of like honey with higher viscosity, and I don't think it will very easily dissolve in cold/not hot liquids. But I guess if you add it at flameout or something you can get it dissolved.

Or, are you saying you would skip that last step and add that ethanol weed juice? That sounds fine, too, though the first way would probably taste better.

Ok, point taken. Extraction efficiency aside, I still think the knockout is easier and more effective.

 

-17C is fricken cold. Can a standard freezer do that?

 

I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam spam spam spam spam spam spam beaked beans spam spam spam and spam!

 

Skip the last step. Especially if you're adding it to an IPA, which I would highly suggest, you're going to get some chlorophyll extraction from dry hopping as well, so the grassy-ness and bitterness from the tincture won't be out of place and, in all probability, will fit right into the beer.