Adding Indian honey to beer without losing its aroma

Why honey beers often taste of nothing

Honey is mostly sugar, about 80% by weight, with most of the rest water. Nearly all of that sugar is fermentable. Yeast eats it completely and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

What makes one honey different from another is a small amount of aroma compounds that come from the flowers. Those compounds are delicate. Boiling drives them off with the steam. A vigorous fermentation then scrubs off much of what is left, because the rush of carbon dioxide carries volatile aromas out through the airlock.

So the classic beginner move, stirring a jar of honey into the boil, gives you a slightly stronger, drier beer with almost no honey character. It is not a bad beer. It just is not a honey beer.

When to add it

You have three better options:

• At flameout, below 80 °C. Turn the heat off, let the wort cool a little, then stir in the honey. You lose less aroma than in the boil while the hot wort still deals with any wild yeast.
• After primary fermentation slows. Usually day four or five for an ale. Dissolve the honey in a little warm boiled water and add it to the fermenter. Fermentation restarts gently, which scrubs less aroma.
• A small dose at packaging. Some brewers prime bottles with honey instead of sugar. This adds a hint of aroma, but honey varies in sugar content, so measure carefully or you risk over-carbonation.

For most homebrewers, adding it after primary gives the most honey character for the least risk.

Is raw honey safe to add to beer?

Honey's high sugar and low water content stop most microbes from growing in it. It can still carry dormant wild yeast and bacteria. Once diluted in beer, those can wake up.

In practice, beer that has already fermented is a tough environment: alcohol, low pH and hop compounds all work against spoilers. Many brewers add raw honey after primary without trouble. If you want to be safer, dilute the honey with an equal amount of water and hold it at about 70 °C for ten minutes. That is gentle enough to keep most of the aroma.

How much honey and what it does to gravity

A kilo of honey adds roughly 14 to 15 gravity points to a 20 litre batch. So 1 kg in 20 litres raises the original gravity by about 0.014, which is close to two percentage points of alcohol once it ferments out.

For a noticeable but balanced honey note, use honey as about 5 to 10% of your total fermentables. Below that, it disappears. Much above 15%, the beer gets drier and thinner, since the honey replaces malt sugars that leave body. Our guide to brewing sugars covers how different sugars affect body.

A blend of honey and a little honey-coloured specialty malt can fill the body back in. Pale crystal malt at 3 to 5% of the grist works well.

Which Indian honeys to try

Different honeys give very different results. A few worth experimenting with:

• Litchi honey from Bihar and nearby: floral and fruity, lovely in a pale ale or blonde ale.
• Mustard honey from the north: mild, sometimes slightly pungent, sets quickly. Better as a background note.
• Multiflora honey: the everyday kind. Character varies by season and region, so taste each jar.
• Wild forest honey: often darker and stronger. Can suit a brown ale or a stout.

Taste the honey neat before you brew. If it tastes of little in the spoon, it will taste of less in the glass. Buy from a source you trust, since adulterated honey with added syrups is a known problem and will give you sugar without aroma.

A simple honey blonde recipe outline

For 20 litres at about 1.048: around 3.6 kg of pilsner or pale malt, 150 g of pale crystal malt and 400 g of litchi honey added on day five. Bitter lightly to about 18 IBU with a clean hop. Ferment with a neutral ale yeast at 18 °C so the yeast does not compete with the honey.

Honey works the same way as other late additions such as jaggery and fruit. Learning how fermentation treats sugar and aroma is the key to all of them. Once you understand that, you can brew with almost any Indian ingredient and predict what will survive into the glass.