Wanting my honey ale to taste like honey

[Gnarbacon]

Tomorrow I will be brewing the very popular White House honey ale. I realize that the honey added in this brew is nothing more than just a sugar for the fermentation, producing little to no honey flavor from using it. I've decided I want to try and give this beer a sweet/honey kick to it. The recipe calls for adding the honey 5 mins before flameout but I'm thinking of adding it after flameout or maybe even during fermentation. Has anyone tampered with this recipe to try and create a honey flavor? Or any beer for that matter? Any tips would be greatly appreciated! :rockin:

 

[nukebrewer]

No matter when you add the honey it will be completely feremented by the yeast. There's two ways to get honey flavor in your beer. Honey malt is the easiest way, though it takes some dialing in to get right. It's very easy to use too much honey malt. The other and much harder/dangerous way is to add honey after fermentation either in conjunction with or followed by pasteurization to keep the yeast from eating the honey. This also necessitates kegging since any attempt to bottle condition will result in yeast fermenting the honey and likely bottle bombs depending on how much honey you use.

 

[ArcLight]

If you add honey after the first few days, the sugars will be fermented but there will still be some remaining flavor compounds that will not disappear. But it will be a mild taste and you need to use quite a bit of honey to have a noticeable flavor. One pound is not enough. I'd try 3 pounds. I primed with honey for one beer, I forgot how much I used, maybe 5-6 ounces?

 

[duboman]

You can also consider using honey to prime when packaging for a good honey flavor but be sure to use a calculator to figure out how much

 

[badlee]

I would wait for the krausen to drop and then add the honey. You will get a great creamy honey flavour and aroma to the brew that way.
I am drinking a honey weizen that was brewed that way as I type

 

[alexnova]

I used honey to prime my WH honey porter and it didn't add any honey flavor. Several ounces won't do squat in a 5gal batch. If your bottling, badlee's approach sounds like it will work. I like nuke's honey malt suggestion as well.

Or you could just drizzle a little honey on the head after pouring...

 

[blakelyc]

Sometimes it depends in what kind of honey you are using... You have to taste it (like anything else) and try to imagine what that honey is going to taste like if it wasn't sweet. A reasonably generic wildflower honey tends to leave behind very little or be slightly floral. The stuff I get locally smells like lavender soap when it is fermented out.

For beers my best success has been using a combination of honey malt (8% of the grain bill) and orange blossom honey. That honey tends to leave behind the most honey flavor, IMHO, and the honey malt is complementary and boosts it up a hair.

Just discussing this in another thread as well, and it turns out that my experiences with honey malt are limited to Belgian yeasts and lower FG, so I haven't found the honey malt too cloying... Ymmv.

 

[ny101]

I prescribe thee 10% honeymalt in thy grist. Go forth and make beer.

 

[Gnarbacon]

Thanks for all the advice, guys. I didn't realize I had so many options with what do with the honey! I had a successful brew and I ended up just using the honey as instructed by my recipe. I didn't want to compromise the flavor of the beer by not adding when I was supposed to. I do want to add more honey though. I like badlees suggestion about adding in honey after the krausen drops but nukebrewer made a good point about potential bottle bombs happening if I use this method, because I will be bottling this batch. How much honey should I add to prevent this from happening?

 

[YeastHerder]

I've done 10% honey malt in the mash, let it ferment for 7 days, pour in 1.5lbs of orange blossom honey (mixed with an equal volume of water so that it would pour and mix into the wort reasonably), let it ferment out again, bottle using the same honey as the priming sugar, and it was slightly noticeable in the finished and chilled product.

IMO honey malt doesn't actually taste like honey, just a rich malty sweetness. It has the same color as honey though. I kinda wonder if color is really why it was named honey malt.

BTW: this is still one of my all-time favs though.