Raw Ales

Looking into some insight from anyone who has done a raw ale (no boil) beer before, traditionally old farmhouse style of beer. Just looking for some tips on what worked best for you without a complete infection.

BeerPundent said:

Looking into some insight from anyone who has done a raw ale (no boil) beer before, traditionally old farmhouse style of beer. Just looking for some tips on what worked best for you without a complete infection.

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Problem with no boil is you will be lacking a lot of color wort will be filled with contaminants from the grains and potentially a ton of off flavors it's not really worth brewing this way.

Point of boil is to boil off compounds you don't want and to sanitize wort. Grains are naturally covered in bacteria and wild yeast.

Plus what about hops or additives to the beer without  a boil?

From what I understand, the wild yeast and bacteria will be killed during the mash out if you let it rest over 160+ F for a while, like a Pasteurization. As for the off flavors, I would think you could minimize that with a choice of water. You'd want softer water without a lot of sulfate in it, I guess.

Also, you could add hops to the mash and get your bitter hops flavor that way, especially if it sat in the hot mash the whole time.

The thing I would be worried about are the fats and proteins that are still in the wort and haven't been coagulated out by boiling. I imagine that eventually they would coagulate and fall out during fermentation, but maybe not.

I've never had this type of beer nor have I tried it, but I imagine it's kind of "mealy" and cloudy with proteins.

What is it really like though?

Mostly correct.  Any issue with the water would be related to Chlorine or Chloramines.  Sulfates enchance the perception of 'dryness' contributing to enhanced bitterness from the hops.

I've listed a couple of references below about brewing raw ales which may help.

http://mutedog.beer/blog/brewing-raw-ale

https://byo.com/mead/item/767-homebrew-101-brew-a-no-boil-brown-ale

I hope they help the OP!

Oginme said:

Mostly correct.  Any issue with the water would be related to Chlorine or Chloramines.  Sulfates enchance the perception of 'dryness' contributing to enhanced bitterness from the hops.

I've listed a couple of references below about brewing raw ales which may help.

http://mutedog.beer/blog/brewing-raw-ale

https://byo.com/mead/item/767-homebrew-101-brew-a-no-boil-brown-ale

I hope they help the OP!

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Very interesting. That lemon/cypress beer looks really good.

I'm very interested in trying things like this out. Un-hopped (herbal) ales and things like this raw ale are interesting to try, mainly because they are usually illegal to sell by commercial breweries and they were the way some people drank beer for a very long time.

Look up Earth Eagle Brewing in Portsmouth, NH.  They offer a good list of herbal beers and gruits.  One of the principle owners, Butch Heilshorn, has a book out "Against All Hops", which is a really bad title as he utilizes hops in addition to herbs and other natural flavorings in his recipes.

I just checked out their website. Many of their gruits sound interesting. I doubt I'll be making a trip to NH any time soon, so I doubt I'll get to try any though.  :-\

Making these things seems much more difficult that brewing regular hopped beer. With hops, it's all been pretty well figured out and standardized, at least when it comes to what types of hops to choose, how much to add, and when. This might also be the case with some more classic herbs and spices, but using "random" herbs would need some experimentation, which I imagine would be pretty time consuming.

There are a lot of Ethiopians in this area and I work with a guy who was telling me about Tej (mead) and Tella (bread beer), which both use gesho leaves as a bittering agent. I think this may be my first foray into this type of thing, because this guy can tell me if I got it right or not. I really want to try a tella recipe using teff, sorghum, and gesho leaves.

Yeah, it is both the fun side and the frustrating side of doing the herbals.  Bruce commented and also notes it in his book that there is a LOT of trial and error.  He said to be prepared to dump a lot of batches until you get one right.  The other challenge he stated was trying to keep consistency in the herbs and berries they use.  They employ a herbalist to source and pick the herbs, leaves, berries, etc. and blend them to get a consistent supply for multiple batches.