Craziest Homebrew

I brewed a Liquid Mounds Bar. It's an imperial Stout at about 14%, used a ton of chocolate in the boil, nibs and coconut in secondary, then created my own "coconut rum barrel" creation and aged with that. It came out exactly as I hoped, it tastes like a Mounds Bar. A nice unexpected surprise was drinking this side by side with Prop at DLD. Turns out I nearly perfectly cloned Prop! Though in all fairness, everyone seemed to like mine more, as the coconut was more pronounced...

 

I've made a few fruit beers - cherry dubbel, blueberry-lemon wit, Berliner Weiss with Cabernet Franc grape juice (I think) from the grapevine at my old residence. None of these were awful but none were awesome, either. In each case, I feel like I took a beer that I would have enjoyed and made it less enjoyable by adding goofy stuff. I don't necessarily feel this way about commercial fruit beers; I think some are really nice.

I've also done some spiced types that I think ranged from mediocre to awful. A cocoa stout (mediocre, because the cocoa powder never settled and the beers were gushers, either because of nucleation points or bottle infection), molasses stout (bottle infected, not fault of the molasses, but I don't think I would have liked it anyhow) a maple-fenugreek bitter (awful), and a roasted pumpkin/pumpkin butter/spiced ale (awful).

My less than stellar homebrew outings make me realize it's harder than just throwing a bunch of stuff in a good base beer.

 

that sounds tasty, but not all that radical.

now the CRAZIEST homebrew "brilliant idea" is anytime a noob says "well for my first brew I figured I'll make an imperial Russian stout"

 

I just started enjoying an IIPA that coasted up to 18.2% abv. Finished at 1.020 and wasn't nearly as bad as I figured it would be. Friend likes it=success.

 

Not that crazy any more but it was at the time... I did a peanut butter milk chocolate stout. Recently did an apple pie beer that turned out nicely. Also did a bourbon spiral Mexican chocolate imperial stout that medaled at three competitions. Now I'm getting into the work of Berliners which are crazy for me.

 

I made a pumpernickel ale w/ caraway seeds and secondaried on toasted onions.

On the whole it was a success, just need to dial in on the caraway and the onion. (Got the flu right after racking, so it was on the onions way too long...)

 

Sounds crazier than it actually was, Foreign-Extra Oatmeal Coffee Milk Stout - aged with oak.

 

Please share recipe!

 

Brewed a spelt malt saison w/ a portion of the brewing liquor being whey from a batch of fresh chevre, lavender a colleague had harvested in a field in France added at FO, a touch of orange blossom and rose water added in the bottling bucket.

 

You win. Tasting notes please.

 

Can't really tell if the spelt did anything beyond body, but it had a surprisingly full mouthfeel despite finishing at 1.000. Whey gave it a nice touch of lactic tang. The combination of the whey and spelt made for the gnarliest break material I've ever seen, it was like egg drop soup.

So far as the floral characteristics, at first it was like the fancy soap at Grandma's house that you're not supposed to use. After a few months, it calmed down to being pleasantly, albeit aggressively flowery, with a nice spiciness in the background. This was using 1g of lavender.

Pretty intense, and not something you would want to drink a lot of, but definitely tasty and a nice change of pace. Still, I don't think I'd do it again.

 

I haven't made it yet, but I'm going to make a sour-milk stout. It's inspired by To Øl's "Sur Mælk"
I just wrote up the recipe for a sweet stout, and I'm going to sour a part of the wort with uncrushed grains.

 

I've been thinking... has anyone actually made a milk stout with milk in it? I have found various threads with people talking about it, but have found no results yet.

 

We have worked up a recipe for home made sriracha that we use for a Red Rye IPA called SriRyaPA. Also just finished up a small Russian Imperial Stout split between Oreos and Thin Mints. We will continue working a bit on both but the Thin Mint is pretty close to what we had hoped right out of the gate...

 

A lot of milk stouts have Lactose Sugar in them, which is from milk (right?). But if you're talking about using a quart of whole milk or something, I'm not sure. Would it curdle?

 

I know a guy who made a dollar weed beer. It was something people either liked or hated. I thought it was actually kind of nice, peppery and grassy... the ultimate lawnmower beer.

 

My guess is that it would curdle. It would also add fat to the beer.

 

Well i've got some post-ferment 100% milk aging a bit at the moment and FYI the fat seems to drop out and make a kind of non-sour yoghurt/ricotta (tastes weird, but not bad at all), so I wouldn't worry too much about that side of things. It could cause issues clogging up the tap when trying to bottle though possibly.

As for curdling... maybe... I'll try mixing a bit of the fermented liquid with some beer to check what happens

 

I did a BIPA last year with the darkest grains and extract I could find. It was an abomination. Luckily you live and learn and just did another BIPA that is my favorite IPA I've done so far. Also did a smoked amber ale with almost a pound of rendered bacon. Love that one too. Kinda interested in the wild ale (via throwing fruit into the fermentor). Also threw around a cucumber rhubarb ale.