How to Make Nettle Beer Recipe | Homestead Honey (2024)

FAQs

How to make beer using honey? ›

To carbonate a 5 gallon batch of beer with honey, you can typically replace 5 oz of priming sugar and use 1 cup of honey. Bring 16 oz of water to a boil. Add the 1 cup of honey to the boiling water and stir vigorously. Add this honey solution to the bottom of your bottling bucket, then rack your beer on top of it.

Since honey is 95% fermentable, most of the sweetness in honey will be lost unless added at later stages in the boil. If you want a subtle honey flavor, add honey between 10 to 30 minutes left in the boil.

Often the types used with mead are best, depending on the style of beer you are brewing and desired character. The percentage of honey to use should be between approximately 2-10%. Adding too much honey will not only increase the needed fermentation time, but also give the beer a decidedly mead-like character.

Aside from making a somewhat pleasant drink, stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) are a great source of vitamin C and apparently help alleviate rheumatic pain.

Mead (/miːd/), also called hydromel (particularly when low in alcohol content), is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water, and sometimes with added ingredients such as fruits, spices, grains, or hops.

The real strength of honey is that it adds potency and lightness to beer, as other sugars do, yet smoothes out the roughness that inevitably comes from adding sugar. We've found that honey also seems to knock the bitter edge off the hops while allowing some of the more subtle hop character to come through.

A good place to start experimenting is with one to two pounds of honey per 5-gallon batch (~0.5–1 kg/19 L) of mid-gravity beer. One pound (0.45 kg) will tend to impart a fairly subtle flavor, while two pounds (0.91 kg) will yield a much more pronounced and noticeable contribution.

In order for honey to ferment, it needs a moisture content of at least 19%. Most honey contains less moisture than this and as such will need water in order to ferment. Not only is homemade fermented honey delicious, but it's also packed with probiotics and enzymes that are beneficial for gut health.

To make a dry 5% ABV mead, the BatchBuildr predicts you will need 0.98 lbs honey, and recommends a 1.034 SG to start. For the 10% ABV dry mead batch, you'll actually need 2.02 pounds of honey and should have an SG of 1.071. For the 15% dry mead, you'll need 3.13 pounds of honey and an original gravity of 1.110.

The dose of nettle tea should be limited to 300 mg one or two times daily. Nettle should not be taken if you are taking any medications, herbs, or other supplements. Before continuing, consult your doctor if any side effects are observed.

How much alcohol is in nettle beer? ›

Nettle IPA 5.3% abv.

When using honey in wine making before the fermentation, you want to use it in-place-of or instead-of the sugar called for in the wine recipe you are using. As a general rule-of-thumb you can replace 1 pound of sugar with 1.2 to 1.3 pounds of honey. You can also use a wine hydrometer to determine how much honey to add.

Use 1 cup of honey per 5 gallon batch to replace the priming sugar, follow the same procedure outlined in your beer recipe kit instructions to prime your beer and put it in beer bottles. Boil the honey in 8-16 oz. of water and pour it into the bottom of your bottling bucket and rack your beer into the honey solution.

Honey is almost entirely fermentable so it won't add any body to the beer, only a small amount of honey flavor and a lot of alcohol. The resulting beer will be very thin unless you use a lot of malt.

Some beer styles take over the flavor, and the honey addition isn't as upfront. Honey beer is sweet and smooth from the honey's texture. A lot of honey beers include herbs and spices in the recipe that partner with the sweetness to make intricate and complex profiles.