Sorrel-Molasses-Jamaica Beer

6/16/10

This was my first completely experimental homebrew project. It was inspired by my urge to make beer out of sorrel, a sour tasting green that's usually used in soups and salads. I thought its tangy flavor would make for a good drink. Ultimately, you couldn't really taste it in the finished product at all, because even with six bunches of it, boiling it for a four-gallon batch didn't yield much flavor.

Which is why I added jamaica (pronounced ha-my-ca), a dried hibiscus flower that's sold in Mexican markets to make a sweet tea that has kind of a cranberry flavor. Basing my made-up formula off of my prior experience with nettle beer, I started to sweeten it/give it fuel for fermenting with sugar, only to discover I didn't have more than several cups. Because I live several doors down from the local food co-op, running out of things is never really a problem, but this time I decided to innovate instead. What I did have in abundance was blackstrap molasses. The flavor combinations swirling in my head, I envisioned a dark, rich, and tangy beer. So I added it to round out the "tea," as I like to call the base for my pre-fermented beverages.

This is what the tea looked like. The sun in my kitchen was giving my project its blessing.

The liquid itself was an incredible deep burgundy. Once in my 3-gallon carboy (the big glass fermenting vessel) and a few smaller jugs, I pitched the yeast.

Here it is on its third day. As evidenced by the giant inflated condom on the back carboy, it was bubbling away.

Just under two weeks later the fermentation had finished and it was ready to bottle.

My friend Davi had a beer she had made that was ready to bottle too, so we teamed up and sterilized a whole bunch of bottles together.

Here's Davi siphoning her beer. Mine looked about the same.

And then I left my house in Oly to go to Kentucky for the summer! I let my bottles sit in the basement to carbonate off the excess sugar and hang out til my return. About two months later I came back to one highly successful project. Tasters of this beer all deemed it a quirky hit. The molasses definitely added to the flavor and the body, but wasn't too sweet and didn't overpower the jamaica which came through in an extremely refreshing way. I'd do it again!