The Homebrewer’s Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to Making Your Own Beer from Scratch offers a month-by-month primer on making your own beer from the ingredients all around you, and the beer recipes are perfect for those brewers interested in creative ways to use these culinary ingredients in their brewing.
Tomatoes, like apples, have suffered from years of industrial farming that emphasizes color and shelf life over flavor and seasonality. They are also a plant that gives untold rewards when you plant at home and harvest in-season, or when you buy heirloom varieties directly from a farmer.
Unfortunately, tomatoes in commercial beer in the United States have been used in ways that mimic cocktails like Bloody Marys and in combinations like tomato and clam juice. But tomatoes themselves haven’t been considered a fermentable ingredient. Interestingly, one of the more inspiring places to see the tomato’s potential in drink is wine. Anyone who hasn’t had tomato wine may be surprised to know that once the juice has been fermented to alcohol, the result is not like tomato sauce. Depending on the tomatoes used, the wine can taste dry and tropical. Omerto, a winery in Quebec, Canada, claims to be the world’s first commercial tomato wine venture, making wines that range in flavor from something akin to a (slightly more alcoholic) Sauvignon Blanc to a white Port. Omerto uses a blend of heirloom tomatoes, as the flavor is more pronounced and dynamic. Taking a wine-maker’s tack on using tomatoes is the best way we can think of to utilize tomatoes in beer, particularly the emphasis on full-flavored heirloom varieties.
Tomatoes are an unusual plant to use for beer, but one with promising results we hope to learn more about after even more experimentation. Our Belgian Dark Strong recipe was our favorite tomato beer. The dried cherry tomatoes retained a ton of their perceived sweetness and became raisiny and prune-like, the same way that grapes do when dried. They blend perfectly with a Belgian yeast strain. Every tomato will be a little different when dried, depending on what it was like when ripe. In general, though, dried tomatoes keep a lot of the tomato character we associate with the fruit, and so are better in slightly maltier beers, particularly with English or Belgian yeasts that emphasize stone fruit esters.
Batch Size: 5 gallons (19 liters)
OG: 1.083
FG: 1.014
ABV: 9.2%
IBUs: 33
GRAINS
11 lb, 12 oz (5.3 kg) Pilsner
1 lb, 12 oz (794 g) Munich
1 lb, 4 oz (567 g) Special B
14 oz (397 g) flaked wheat
7 oz (198 g) aromatic malt
MASH
Mash in with 6 gallons (22.7 l) water to hit 150°F (66 °C). Sparge with 6 gallons (22.7 l) water at 168°F (76°C).
HOPS
2 oz (57 g) Willamette at 60 minutes
ADDITIONAL INGREDIENTS
1 oz (28 g) golden raisins at flameout
1 pint jar worth of sun-dried cherry tomatoes at flameout
LENGTH OF BOIL
90 minutes with 15-minute whirlpool at flameout
YEAST
Belgian Abbey Ale
FERMENTATION
Ferment at 68°F (20°C) for one week and allow to rise to 80°F (27°C) until fermentation is complete.
This recipe was featured in an excerpt from The Homebrewer's Almanac: A Seasonal Guide To Making Your Own Beer From Scratch, by Marika Josephson, Aaron Kleindon, and Ryan Tockstein, published by The Countryman Press, and reprinted in our Cooking with Beer 2016 special issue with permission from the publisher. Buy your copy of The Homebrewer's Almanac at better bookstores, homebrew shops, craft-beer stores, or your favorite online retailer.
For more information about Scratch Brewing, see this Breakout Brewer profile from the August/September 2015 issue of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®.