For some reason I am going off the wall with my next two brews.

I got Austin Homebrew Supplies Juniper Rye kit. Yeah. Juniper rye!
I love Gin, so what the heck

I also got my grain bill and everything I need for a peanut butter chocolate stout.


So what really strange brews have you done?

I just got to crack open my first bottle of my strawberry / rhubarb ale. 4lbs of rhubarb and 8lbs of strawberries added to an English pale ale that I swapped the yeast out to the Australian ale WLP009 yeast for its bready properties. Was going for strawberry/rhubarb pie. I think I need some more malt the next time I do it. Maybe some biscuit to get the crust flavor a little stronger. I cut one ounce of hops out of the original recipe because rhubarb is inherently bitter/tart. It was a good move. perfectly balanced.

It is an easy drinking beer with tons of flavor and complexity. So far everyone loves it. I will make it again.

Another one I made was a yellow plum ale (Plum Crazy Merican Ale). Again, basic pale ale recipe with 2lbs yellow plums added in the last 5 minutes of the boil and 2lbs added (with 1lb light brown sugar) to the secondary. Another crowd pleaser. I upped the carbonation on it to get more fizzy feel to it. Almost reminds me of a good spumante in mouth feel.

Cilantro-lime Pale Ale.  It was actually pretty good!

My freshman year of college I was just getting into wine making. I brewed some orange pineapple wine. It tasted odd but was stout as shit.

I made a peanut butter stout from a recipe I grabbed off of Homebrewtalk this Summer.  It was a big hit at a Labor Day gathering.

It really wasn't all too super crazy, but my craziest was a chocolate chambord stout. If you can imagine a chocolate covered raspberry, that's what the beer tasted like. Needless to say, it didn't last long at all.

Brewed a "garbage can ale", had some left over DME that was getting clumpy, old hops, an expired can of malt syrup, several old bottles of cane syrup that had crystallized in the bottom that I rinsed out with hot water and half a pack of open US-04. Threw it together on the stove at midnight, dumped it in a corney no chill, tossed the yeast in in the AM and forgot about it for a month or so. Tasted like an IPA with just a little tangy citrus bite. Right then & there I realized that it's hard to screw up making beer. While it might not win a contest, it tastes better than any FYB.

My Wildfire Weizen was a wheat malt with a couple ounces of dark malt steeped in it during the boil and a couple ounces of smoked malt and an ounce of juniper berry steeped in it for the last 10 minutes of the boil.  The first batch was really good stuff.  The second one not so much.  Gotta pay attention to the boil time and get the juniper out when it's 10 min. is up.  Otherwise it's overwhelming.

I grew a ton of Caribbean red habaneros one year and had gallons of them by fall.  I chopped them up, "mashed" for a while (NEVER DO THIS INDOORS, ask me why) mixed with some sugar and fermented into wine.  It smelled like fruits and melons while it was fermenting.  And hot, fresh capsicum.  Tasty, but hot!


I should have bottled and carbonated some in bottles with original labels still on to leave in people's houses as a prank!!

My chocolate pb stout is fantastic!!!

My juniper rye is in secondary. Taste right now is good. 6% and dry with a nice piny taste from the juniper and chinook.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Porter

Took a agressively hopped porter, added cocoa nibs in the boil and more in the seconday, peanut butter powder in the boil, and topped it off with a nice banana'y Hefe yeast.

Turned out great. next time I will add more cocoa and PB. And the first day or so of the ferment will probably be a little warmer. Get more of those banana esters out.

I did a kit called "Old Bumble" and it turned out to be about 16%

here is the link for anybody who might want to give it a try. It is one of the best beers I ever brewed.



Old Bumble
Yield: 5 gallons

Starting Gravity: 1.135
Final Gravity: 1.034
Alcohol by Volume: 13.1
Color SRM: 24
Hop IBU’s: 42.5
Ingredients
7 Lbs. Light Dry Malt Extract 1 Grain Steeping Bag
1 Lbs. Brown Sugar 1 Hop Bag
.13 lbs. Torrified Wheat (Grain)
2 lbs. 20L Crystal Malt (Grain) 5 oz Priming Sugar
.13 lbs. Chocolate Malt (Grain) 2 pk Brewers Yeast
.13 lbs. Roasted Barley (Grain) 1 pk Champagne Yeast
4 lbs. Mesquite Honey
2 oz. Kent Golding (Bittering) 60minutes
1 oz. Fuggle (Flavoring) 30 Minutes
1 oz. Fuggle (Aroma) 10 Minutes
1 oz. Kent Golding (Aroma) Dry Hop  

More traditional than weird; but the strangest I've made is a grape pyment.

That's mazing, not brewing silly I can't wait for my orange blossom show mead to age; 20 gallons of it should be ready around the 4th of July!

Kegged and bottled the juniper rye. I gave a taste and it is different for sure, but pretty darn good.

It has quite a bit of bitter. Chinook and the juniper are to blame for that. But it is not overwhelming. The nose is more of malt than hops and it is surprisingly malty. Almost sweet. The strong malty sweet counters the bitter nicely and I am really looking forward to haveing some cold and carbed.

I just bottled a half galon of kumbacha for the wife.
I didn't have any SCOBY like it called for so I just pitched some Notto