Years ago, I made a concerted effort to spend more time brewing with alternative sugar sources. The resulting beers—brewed with honey, molasses, black treacle, golden syrup, and more—had dimensions and accents that often surprised me, expanding my brewing horizons. This ESB with honey became a steady favorite, and it’s relatively easy to nail on the first or second attempt.
Style: If you need an excuse to brew this, Alternative Sugar Beer is a BJCP category—a place for the “harmonious marriage of sugar and beer,” where the base style is recognizable but gets a noticeable flavor addition from your chosen adjunct sugar. To succeed with this, you want a flavorful sugar that leaves some character in the beer after fermentation—a sweet, unfermented sugar character won’t work. Yet if there’s nothing left of the sugar’s flavor, you’re better off entering the beer in the base style’s category. Incidentally, the same holds true for casual drinkers—if they see “honey beer,” they expect to taste the honey… but they don’t want to drink actual honey.
Ingredients: Let’s start with the sugar. There are thousands of types of honey that vary in flavor and intensity, and we should follow the lead of our base style and go for something flavorful—an ESB has enough malt character that a lighter-flavored honey would get lost in the mix. After tasting different types at a local honey vendor, I settled on buckwheat honey. It has a great beer-friendly flavor profile—spicy and earthy, with a complementary mineral character that works well with an English pale ale. I find that 10 percent of the fermentables is a good starting point. We also don’t want to add so much (say, 50 percent) that it becomes a braggot. From my base ESB recipe, I’m just cutting back the Maris Otter to sub in the honey, keeping the crystal malts the same.
Because this honey has a spicy note that accentuates bitterness—and because sugar dries out the beer, with less malt to cushion that bitterness—I’m also dialing back the bittering hops. On the other hand, I’m adding more at flameout to maintain that nice English-hop aroma to balance the evident honey character.
For yeast, we have a polarizing choice: the Ringwood strain. It’s an infamous diacetyl producer, but we can manage that—see below. What we want are those undeniably English fruity esters and that malt-forward profile. We also want its relatively low attenuation—we don’t want to risk thinning out the beer too much.
Process: If you have softish water, consider a small gypsum addition to flint up the flavor and accentuate the style. I add my honey while running off into the kettle, allowing the hot wort to dissolve it. (Don’t worry, you’ll still taste the honey—but if your honey’s aroma is more delicate, you can add it at flameout or whirlpool.) We start fermentation relatively cool (62°F/17°C) before an increase to ambient temperature to encourage diacetyl cleanup—this yeast can get buttery without a patient, thorough rest.
The finished beer should be easily recognizable as an English pale ale (or your own base style of choice), while the honey (or other sugar) adds pleasant background flavors that complement and enhance your other ingredients. Of course, you can also use flavorful sugars to modify your existing recipes. No need to substitute—you can try adding pounds of interesting sugars to contribute more flavor and ABV. These recipes tend to be easy to create—just take care to consider attenuation with your yeast and the flavor compatibility with your malt and hops. Keep it simple and have fun with it.