Tea Beer Experiment Phase 2: Adding The Tea

The base beer I made almost two weeks ago is done with primary fermentation. It started at 1.044 and finished at 1.008, one point above the target FG. That gives 4.7% ABV. As expected, there is still a fair amount of residual sweetness from the honey and crystal malts. The Cascade hops didn't impart a ton of bitterness (as intended), but you can definitely smell them. The beer has a subtle citrusy note and aroma. The predominant flavor is really just the grainy malt flavor. This should be a really nice base to let these tea flavors shine. Let's add some tea!

From left to right: 9 g Earl Grey, 9 g Jasmine Oolong, 16 g Thai Tea 

I decided to err on the side of too much tea flavor, since I really want it front and center. For the teas that were actually tea (Earl Grey and Jasmine Oolong), I went with 9 grams, or about 1/3 oz. I've seen recipes that call for an ounce in 5 gallons, but those all seemed to be pretty lightly flavored. This will be a good 66% more, but it's also in secondary instead of in the boil, where we don't have to worry as much about tannins, and where flavor extraction will be much more gradual. With the Thai Tea, I looked at how much would be used in a single 200 ml serving (8 g) and doubled that, imagining dumping two cups of tea into the 1-gallon carboy. That seemed reasonable.

The beer was pretty clear for being only 12 days old, though I did manage to kick up a little sediment while racking into the third carboy. No big deal—I will need to crash the tea out itself, so the sediment will have another chance to resettle. I wanted to split the batch evenly, and my bottling wand came in handy here, allowing me to control the flow into the carboys and go back to even things out if needed. 

Three carboys await the tea.

Dumping the tea straight in.

I had considered adding the tea in a hop bag or something like that, but the necks of the 1-gallon carboys are so small that I'm sure it would be a huge hassle trying to get the bag back out afterward. Instead I just inserted a funnel and dumped the tea straight in. If needed, I'll put a paint strainer over my autosiphon to make sure I leave the tea behind. I didn't bother sanitizing the funnel, because the dry tea shouldn't pick anything up from it, and I didn't want the tea just getting stuck to the funnel. I'm hoping the nutrient scarcity, pH, and alcohol of the beer will prevent anything nasty from taking hold. I'm glad I'm doing the secondary in glass, though, just in case. My original thought was to bottle these, and I probably still will, but that does leave them more open to the possibility of infection. I'm only going to leave the tea steeping in the beer for 10 days or so—if I were kegging that would probably not be long enough for anything bad to get established, and then the beer would immediately be chilled to a temperature that inhibits growth of any kind. With bottling, however, it takes another 2-3 weeks for the bottles to carbonate. Furthermore, because bacteria and other nasties can often consume sugars that are unavailable to standard saccharomyces cerevisiae, further fermentation can happen in the bottle, causing bottle bombs. I guess I'm just going to take my chances!

Earl Grey

Jasmine Oolong

Thai Tea

Stay tuned for phases 3 and 4: bottling and tasting!