Hi there,
15 years ago I brewed a tripel with rosehips (the big orange/red ones) with succes. But unfortenately I losted the recipe but not the degustationform :-. I tried all-grain 10 liter batches with added rosehips during kettle boil and batches with smashed rosehips/pectinase and yeast and then put together with the chilled wort.
Still not succesfull as it was.
Do you have experience with rosehips recipes?
greetings
bierwillumpie from Holland
I would think you would want to treat rose hips like fruit, i.e. added in secondary. I find rosehips get much sweeter and more flavourful/pleasant to eat after they have frozen so perhaps freezing first would be helpful. This will also weaken any other biologicals on the fruit AND break up cell walls to maximize juice/flavour extraction.
so actual experience beyond that. I think the brasserie Dieu du Ciel has a beer with rosehips.they might be willing to give you some hints if you contact them. They are primarily french speakers I believe.
Perhaps “dry hipping” would be the way to go. I have played around with rose hips a few times and adding them at flame out gave an odd flavor (kind of reminded me of blood) that I didn’t care for.
Hi there,
Thank you for your answers. I’ve found something about Jopenbier; a Polisch beer with rosehips. Un fortunately without a recipe.
I’ve brewed an all grain Belgian Ale type
74,4 % pilsmalt 3 ebc
23.3 % munchenermalt 16 ebc
2,3% caracrystal 120 EBC
20 gram Saaz 3,9 alfa acid 90 min boiled 22 EBU
and 100 grams rosehips and 10 min boiled with Irisch moss
OG 1048
FG 1012
yeast: Safale S-04
It is still in the bottle for lagering , not very clear (doesn’t bother me) No reddisch its color is 17 EBC measured before botteling.
anxious fot the outcome 
bierwillumpie
They brewery I worked for had a really good sour that was aged on rose hips. Delicious.
Brooklyn Brew Shop has a book titled “Beer Making Book: 52 Seasonal Recipes for Small Batches”. They are recipes for 1 gal. batches, but they also give 5 gal, versions. They have a recipe “Rose-Cheeked & Blonde”. It is a Belgian blonde ale and they use rose hips 20 minutes into the boil. At the end of the 60 minute boil, rosebuds and Belgian candi sugar are added. Hope that helps.
This is really tasty idea
Hi there,
Thank you all for the usefull tips. The outcome of rosehips golden ale is nice. It seems I’ve made a correct point by brewing A belgian blond ale style beer. Only I boiled the rosehips for 10 minutes. Fortunately I’ve still 2,5 kilogram rosehips in the freezer, so next batch I will boil them longer.
The beer is a bit acid, but I know that will become less after aging. Otherwise I will use lactic sugar in combination with normal sugar for priming.
greetings Bierwillumpie
I brewed a 5.5 gallon batch with 40 bags of “I love lemon” tea from Bigelow. It was an extract beer and i put the bags in 5-7 at a time to taste starting before the steeping of the specialty grains. The tea contains rose hips, lemongrass, lemon verbena and a little bit of peppermint. turned out very well-slight lemony flavor. reddish yellow color. I used WL568 Saison Blend yeast with pale malt extract as a base. 2 lbs of german wheat 1 lb of american wheat, modest amounts of cara vienna and chrystal 40 maybe. The tartness of the yeast went well with the grassy lemon flavors from the tea. I am not sure how well the rose hips came through because it never isolated that flavor.
Mikkeller’s Spontanrosehip was a decent beer. It wasn’t my favorite of the series, but I could certainly see the potential.
rosehips have a lot of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) which will lower your pH. Adding a fruit that lowers your pH is a bad thing in a secondary isn’t it? not unless you are pitching a stabilizer to counter it. It may get you into a sticky situation. But I am not as smart as I would like to be in the subject, so maybe not. I can tell you I am not sure if you would want it in your mash, primary or secondary.
Why is lowering pH in secondary a bad thing? Almost any fruit would do this, as most are high in some combination of citric, malic or tartaric acid. As a matter of fact, I find that if the pH is too high, then that leads to an insipid fruit beer. A touch of acidity (often coming from the fruit itself) is enough to lift up the fruit character a bit and helps with the end product, in my opinion.
Totally agree.
I will acknowledge that I do not have enough knowledge to offer up an, lets call it proper, opinion. But back to the OP the target beer is a Tripel with a starting pH of 5.2-5.4? Adding something like 1.2g (from his 100g of rosehips) of ascorbic acid after primary fermentation when pH has dropped to something like 3.8-4.4 wouldn’t cause a problem in the final pH of the beer?
Quote from the Principles of Ph from byo.com
And Finally, Fermentation
During fermentation, the pH continues to drop for a variety of reasons. Yeast cells take in ammonium ions (which are strongly basic) and excrete organic acids (including lactic acid). The yeast strain chosen can affect the final beer pH. Most lager beers finish at 4.2–4.6, with some ales ending as low as 3.8. (Sour beers may have pH values around 3.0.)
Achieving an optimal pH, less than 4.4, favors faster beer maturation (including uptake of diacetyl), better beer clarity, better biological stability and a “more refined” beer taste.
Brewers rarely adjust final beer pH with acid. To reach a suitable final pH, all that is needed is to conduct a good, vigorous fermentation. As pH decreases with attenuation, drier beers tend to have slightly lower pH values. One interesting tidbit about fermentation is that some molecules in the fermenting beer become decolorized as the pH lowers and so the color of beer actually lightens slighty during fermentation.
I took the quote “Brewers rarely adjust final pH with acid.” As a sign to not add an acid that would cause the pH to lower, if that was not desired. Which if you lowered a Tripels pH with 1.2g of ascorbic acid would it not drop the pH into a sour range? I would assume that to be undesirable.
which depending on the plant could be as high as 2g of ascorbic acid for that 100 grams of rosehips. It is not like he is using an extract of rosehips, but I would assume that to be difficult to manage in terms of it coming across as an unbalanced tartness in the tripel. But again I am working on assumptions, I will take any opportunity to learn as I go too.
Not to take things off on a tangent too far but…
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Most brewers make their acid additions to the mash water, but just because brewers may not usually adjust pH of a finished beer, that doesn’t make it wrong to do so. Adding a touch of baking soda to a stout that tastes muddy, or a touch of lactic acid to a lager that tastes a bit flabby will likely improve the beer, sometimes greatly so. You can’t go by the numbers, you have to go by your palate.
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Winemakers adjust acidity of their wine all the time. There’s no reason it can’t work for beer as well.
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Rose hips contain more malic acid than ascorbic acid (5-10 times more malic acid than apples). That would likely be a much bigger factor than their ascorbic acid content.
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Not all acids have the same flavor impact where tartness is concerned. Acids like citric and malic are quite tart (think lemons and sour patch kids, respectively). Other acids, such as lactic, produce a softer acidity. I have no clue where ascorbic fits in here, because it is rarely used as a flavorant. Again, I’d be willing to wager that the malic acid content of the hips would have a significantly greater flavor impact.
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Fruits are pretty commonly added to beer. If the added acidity was a problem, then there’d be no fruit beer.
I understand your reasoning, but I think you’re making too many assumptions and extrapolations to make an accurate prediction on the end result. There’s just no way to tell if it will be too tart without tasting it. And if it is, I doubt that the ascorbic acid would be the primary cause.
Ascorbic acid is only bitter, no depth of flavor just makes beverages taste bitter. The only example I can think of is like bottled lime juice vs fresh lime juice. Bottled is cloyingly sweet from the added sugar to balance the antioxidant benefits from the additional artificial ascorbic acid in the lime juice, lost in production and reintroduced which is common practice. It tastes bitter, cloyingly sweet, and almost all lime aroma is lost. Fresh lime juice that is sweet, sour, tangy, and bitter with loads of lime aroma. There is no question bottled lime juice makes TERRIBLE pico de gallo, lol.
Where did you find that rose hips have 5-10x as much malic acid as apples? That would be anywhere from 3.5g-7.6g of malic acid per 100g of rosehips. Which would be bitter, and tart. Rosehips are used in sours, so I guess taking a Tripel and making it sour or tart is the direction the OP is taking, Let us know how it comes out!