Recently someone on the forum gave me the idea for doing a beer “Chopped” competition. A basket of mystery ingredients that we must use to make a beer. My friends and I are calling our version “Skunked.” (Trademark pending…)
So I’m throwing this out to the Forum for the list of ingredients. They should be ingredients you would ACTUALLY want to make a beer with, but challenging enough to throw us some curves. Ultimately the goal of the show “chopped” is to make a dish that’s incredible…so we should have something in our “baskets” to give us some blueprints for an incredible beer.
All ingredients welcome…we’ll probably have a base malt of pale ale, but all hops, fruits, yeasts, styles, etc are up for you all to decide. We’re looking for 4-7 different ingredients!
Spices: Curry powder, turmeric, Pink peppercorns, cayenne, cumin pods, cardamom pods, fennel seed, or just have the nice ladies at Penzey’s pick something at random.
Or just go to an ethnic market (Indian, Mexican, and ‘Asian’) and pick stuff up that smells good.
We made a club brew a few years ago with Frosted Flakes and an entire German chocolate cake. It was one of the worst beers I ever tasted. Dumped it all down the drain.
However now I just made a batch of pale ale with Grape Nuts about 10 days ago. Tasted it a couple days ago. It needs more hops, but it tastes very good. I don’t taste any Grape Nutty flavor, but it tastes just fine as a regular pale ale. I think I used around 15 or 20% Grape Nuts for the total grist, and I really don’t taste it in the final beer at all. Next time I’ll have to try a higher percentage. Of course, Grape Nuts is kind of like cheating – unlike most other cereals, its primary ingredients are wheat and malted barley.
Basically walk through the produce and/or spice and/or granola section of Whole Foods or any other good supermarket and grab whatever looks interesting.
My club has been doing something similar for a few years now called “Iron Buddy Brew” as a way for brewers who are newer to the club to pair up with club veterans. The teams collaborate and come up with a brew that must incorporate 3 of 10 ingredients drawn randomly from a hat. Ingredients range from wood to breakfast cereal to cookies to spices.
This year we had to incorporate three or more of the following: cumin, Rice Krispy treats, oranges/orange peel, pomegranate juice, cherries, maple syrup, zingers, doughnuts, nutmeg, or raspberries.
We’re having our annual Iron Buddy Brew Challenge Thursday at our meeting. I’ll post back what crazy s**t people came up with.
At the last local club meeting somebody was telling me the club did a wal-mart competition where people could only brew with stuff they bought at wal-mart. One guy bought bird seed. Apparently the beer wasn’t too bad but I wonder whether it was a good beer in its own right or a good beer among the others in the competition.
The local club also does an Iron Mash competition. We get a box of the key ingredients–hops, grain and yeast–and brew at one of the local breweries so there’s hot and cold water already available. Then there’s a second box of special ingredients that contains four spices/fruit/who knows. You have to use all of one of the special ingredients and at least a small amount of the other three.
I haven’t decided whether to compete this year (and it would be my first) but I’m interested in seeing what ingredients they give out and what kinds of beer people are making.
I used GrapeNuts in a beer once. A brown ale, I think. The beer was good but I can’t really say the cereal did anything other than increase the batch cost. It made people think twice about drinking it though.
