Green tea beer

[fayderek14]

So I plan on creating an extract beer that involves green tea. I got a couple of questions and a couple of ideas.

Could I use tea that is already packaged and bagged like biggelow tea or something like that or should I be using whole leave?

My plan would be to steep a fair amount of tea in the boil before the specialty grains are added at a temperature of around 150 then add the specialty grains after the tea is removed.

From there I would brew the batch normally maybe add a few more ounces or bags of tea within the last 5 minutes or at flame out.

Next I would cool the wort and before pitching the yeast I would add a few ounces of cold brewed green tea.

After about a week or a week and a half I would transfer the beer to the secondary and add a few more bags of tea.

When I came time to bottle I would try the beer and see what it tastes like. If it's not the taste I'm looking for I would probably add more cold brewed tea straight to the bottling bucket.


I know that green tea is a fragile flavor and would be quite easy to lose the taste within the brew, so my idea is that if I am consistently adding tea to every step I'm going to have a lot more luck with getting the flavor in looking for.


Please let me know what you think and if in overlooking anything on this batch. Thanks!


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[Zoidberg]

Boiling or adding before fermentation is a bad idea. It will most likely lose all the tea flavor. The best green tea is steeped at 170F for about 4 minutes. So this is all I would do to it before adding. I also remove tea and sterilize by keeping it above 154F for 15 minutes.

Here is what I did and my test sample are great.

I brewed a blonde ale recipe for 5 gallons ended boil with only 4 gallons of wort and transferred to 5 gallon carboy and pitched yeast (Notty).

I waited about a week then I brewed a gallon of double strength green tea using the best loose leaf green tea I could get. It had some fruit and other flavors in it. Smelled like tropical fruit and dank green tea.

After brewing the tea I strained out all leave then kept it at at least 160F for 15min to sterilize. I cooled and used the gallon of extra strength tea to top of the 4 gallons into a full 5 gallons and let it "secondary" with almost no head space another 10 days.

I'm about to bottle tomorrow but the hydrometer samples are delicious.