Chilli Beer

Got around to tasting the latest batch of home-brew beer recently: a chilli beer. It came out very nicely: very refreshing but with a chilli aftertaste in the back of your throat. You can definitely taste the chilli after drinking a pint :).

I used a beer kit as a base, since I haven't yet had the patience to do a brew from scratch. The ingredients were:

  1. A Black Rock Mexican Lager beer kit.
  2. 1kg of Coopers brewing sugar.
  3. About 20 red chillis.
  4. Caster sugar for carbonation.

I took half the chillis and cut off the stems and cut them up roughly (in hind sight, it probably would have been enough to cut them lengthwise). I then covered them with a small amount of water in a pot and pasteurised them in the oven at 80°C for about half an hour. The wort was then prepared as normal, but with the pasteurised chillis added before the yeast.

After the fermentation was complete (about a week later), I cut up the remaining chillis (a fair bit smaller this time – they need to easily fit through the neck of a bottle) and pasteurised them the same way as the first batch. This lot was added to the bottles along with the priming sugar.

The beer tasted pretty good 4 weeks after bottling, and it should improve further with time.

Comments:

Michael R. Head -

I got into some brewing a while back, but stopped after I messed up a couple batches (mostly documented at http://beer.subfire.org).

Anyway, your recipe sounds interesting... I may have to get back into the craft.

Simon Rumble -

Yummy that sounds good. I've made chilli beer before but I think you've just reminded me and encouraged me to have another go at it.

The way I've done it is to just shove scored, lightly steamed whole chillis in the bottles, but I like your approach.

Davyd -

Do you keep your Chilli-beers in your Chilli-bin?

mako -

I know a cheesecake this might go well with:

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/reflections/20050720-00.html