Comment on Spruce tip beer ('tis the season)
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Awesome design! I’ll drop a few thoughts on it.
Darkening is just sugar caramelization accelerated greatly by acidity of tips. Just a small pH drop in moisture - and tips are tart - accelerates the process by orders of magnitude.
With high temperature, you lose some volatile stuff unless you have it all sealed (which itself is explosive). I think you can achieve similar extraction by alcohol groups (that’s what sugar does) by adding tips in secondary. But then you won’t have all this caramel. Caramel could come from specialty malt or sugar caramelized separately. Anyway, overdefined problems are just more refined tools for future experiments!
Was this tips extraction simple? And filtration?
tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Wow, thanks once again for insight! Yes, this method was easy and fast, although what I was hoping for was no caramellisation of the sugar. The windowsill method supposedly produces a clear end result. @CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de there solved that part of the puzzle, in fact it’s going to just dissolve the sugar with moisture evaporating from the spruce. The ultimate extraction in hindsight would probably have been with sugary water in a sealed vessel in the fridge for a couple of days…? Or honey, as you pointed out. I was hoping to not have too many competing aromas so that the tips would shine through.
Filtering was also easy, very little of the tips escaped the mesh basket. I filtered the tips solution heated up, and the sugar didn’t clog the coffee filter at all, and I was able to filter the wort with the same filter bag.
My tall kettle had a lid on, but yeah, some volatiles are gone with the wind. Keenly waiting to sample the end result. However, an extraction method without heating shall be the ultimate goal…
MuteDog@lemmy.world 5 days ago
The ultimate extraction would likely be achieved with high proof alcohol. Sugar syrup I think would be less effective than with dry sugar as the dry sugar would exert more osmotic pressure on the tips to draw liquid (and thus flavor) out of the tips.
You can also add them to the boil as you would hops.
alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Overcooled sugar syrup (what people usually make by heating sugar in water and then cooling down) would technically be a suspension of sugar nanoparticles in saturated syrup. This should totally be more potent for chemical extraction than pure sugar, even after extraction of fluids into it which could only saturate it into syrup phase.
Throwing alcohol into beer preparation souds like illegal move in Finland an USA afaik, LOL