I’ve googled a bit for acorn beer, and found a few discussions but not much about results. I did find a post (not in this forum, I think), where the guy made a small batch, said it was bitter, and hoped it would smooth out over time. I had to wonder whether he tried to remove the tannin, but he didn’t give much detail. In any case I’m trying it now. It’s fermenting right now, so the results aren’t in yet, but here are links to my blog, describing what I’ve done: Acorn Beer, etc.: Introduction Acorn Beer, etc.: Acorn beer beginnings Acorn Beer, etc.: Acorns to wort
Well, supposedly Indians ate a lot, Koreans use acorn flower (maybe heavily processed), and we tried roasting some with oil and salt. They taste fine, but they’re too hard to use like regular nuts.
Somewhere I read an article about making acorn flour. They have to be soaked a long time to leach out the high levels of tannins in them. I’m not sure if the article mentioned anything other than water soaking with lots of changes.
Yes, I talk about tannins a little in the blog (links given above). I soaked the acorns, with several changes of water. These acorns did not have a lot of tannin in them to begin with, so I’m not sure the soaking was necessary, in this case. Apparently tannin level varies a lot among oak species. The Eastern white oak in our front yard seems to have very mild (low-tannin) acorns.
If you’ve ever tried chewing on a hop pellet and found it to be a less than pleasurable experience, you certainly won’t want to chew on an acorn . . . unless you’re into that sort of thing. I’ve done the hop pellet thing a few times but only once with an acorn, haha.
[quote]…you certainly won’t want to chew on an acorn…
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It depends on the kind of acorn. The ones we collected have a very low tannin level, maybe no more than regular walnuts. My wife says that tree is an Eastern white oak. OTOH, the ones in the backyard, that my wife says are from a pin oak, are just as you suggest: very, very bitter. I didn’t use any of those in the beer.
Excellent information. I was playing with a couple cups of raw chestnuts this weekend with the intention of doing a similar brown ale. This will definitely be useful.
BTW, I transferred to the secondary today, and drank the sample for the gravity reading. It tasted like brown ale, with no acorn flavor that I noticed. Could be worse. It’s not done yet, so the beer or my taste buds could change.
A different procedure I may try some day is to roast the acorns and let them soak in the secondary. That works well for coffee beans, even dark-roasted so they’re oily. Obviously it’s a very different ingredient.
I think If you roasted the acorns you might get better flavor contribution from them. I don’t know exactly what an accord tastes like but I find with many nuts roasting brings out flavors that just aren’t that apparent in the raw nut.
I should have included a summary in the original version of this reply: It tastes like brown ale. Several people have tried it, and no one noticed anything obviously unusual. Maybe a drier finish than expected. It also has great head retention, and quite a chill haze, so the acorns may have contributed protein.
I don’t think acorn has much use even if you can get past the tannin issue because the nuts lack any meaningful flavor. Roasting might be a good idea. I’d try tasting the roasted nuts directly. If there isn’t a significant flavor you like then there’s probably not much you can do to make it worth the trouble of adding acorns to a brew except to say you added acorns.
I did taste the acorns. They had a pleasant flavor, a little sweetness, some buttery character, but otherwise they’re not like anything else I’m familiar with. The flavor isn’t strong, but not weak, either.
I made a honey acorn amber ale in 2015 that was fantastic with a slight nutty flavor. The trick is in the processing of the acorns to get rid of the bitter tannins. When I went back to to VA one year, i gathered around 20 lbs of white or red oak acorns out in the yard and shipped them back to CA via the USPS. I had put them in a paper grocery bag and sealed it up with tape, then into a shipping box. When I received them, they had started sprouting due to the moisture content they already had, plus the closed warm environment. Unwittingly, I had accidentally started the malting process on those things and it probably had a huge affect on the taste, because those things were awesome in the beer. I don’t recall there being a lot of nutty flavor, but it did contribute something a little different than regular nuts that had more flavor to them.
It took FOREVER to clean them down to the internal nut, peeling the outer parts away, but once i did, i soaked them in a bucket of water for about a week, changing it a couple of times a day to leech out the tannins. You could definitely taste it in the water. Once it didn’t taste all that bitter, i baked them at 350 for about 30 minutes to get some roast on them. That dried them out pretty well. The initial load of 20 lb. worth of acorns had been reduced to roughly 5 lbs of actual dried acorn nuts. Then i just used them like any other nut with about 3 lbs. of honey in the 5 gal. recipe.
5 lbs. Acorn Meal
7 lbs. Pale Malt
1 lb. Torrified Wheat
1 oz. Magnum (60 mins)
1 oz. Goldings East Kent (15 mins)
3 lbs. Honey (10 mins)
1 Whirlfloc tablet (10 mins)
1 oz. Goldings East Kent (1 min)
Safale US-05
1 tsp. Yeast Nutrient (Primary 3 days)
I grew up in the south. We have several varieties oak
White oak, red oak, water oak, live oak, cherrybark oak, Cow oak, willow oak. And they all taste horrible.
Deer, squirrels and wild hogs eat them.
But that’s about all.
I’m old school.
I started brewing in 1984.
Dont really understand the new, let’s throw anything into our beer thing, but I’m a firm supporter of brewing the way you like. How you like and when you like.
Hey, there’s a pine cone. Let’s brew a pine cone beer.
But wait, let’s use pine straw too. Screw it, throw in some bark too. Oh, I see some raccoon dung, let’s try that.
???
Go for it