Growing up in a South Asian household in gray Britain, the only color I found was in our kitchen. My dad was from an Indian family born in Singapore, and my mum was Malay. That meant dishes would be pan-Asian, taken from whatever region they felt like. We had roti, rendang—a slow-cooked curry with Indonesian origins—tandoori chicken, and dahl … usually all in the same week.
Cooking was on the scale of home or craft brewing, with spices in industrial-size bags and a massive bin of rice under the stairs. No shortcuts, and anything macro—in this case, takeout food or McDonald’s—was banned.
Inevitably, when I became an adolescent, I started to rebel. I directed my ire at turmeric for being what my white friends called smelly, and for staining fingers. Growing up in a dull market town, I needed a form of dissent. While other kids took up smoking, I raged against the turmeric.
Thirty-odd years later, I know that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turmeric—which Indians call by its Hindi word, haldi—is something I enjoy every day. I cook with it, take tablets of it, and add it to frothed milk. It’s good for your joints, aids digestion, and is anti-inflammatory.
And, yes, I’ve even brewed beer with it. To be clear: I’m a writer and not even a homebrewer, so when I say “brew,” the reality is that I helped come up with the idea of a beer and stuck my name on it. Then, on brew day, I nodded my head a lot, carried the occasional bag, and felt of use only when I made cups of tea.
Still, at the end, there was beer. And it glowed.
Brewing with Turmeric
The initial idea was to bring a bit of Indian spice to a couple of beers. However, along the way, the brewers made a couple of discoveries: first, just how lazy I am when it comes to manual labor; second, just how damned good turmeric is as an ingredient.
The first brew was with Villages Brewery in southeast London, tweaking their Big Salad hoppy IPA. On the hot side, we added coriander seed, fennel seed, jaggery, and amchoor powder—made from dried green mangoes—as well as turmeric. On the cold side, the brewers dry hopped with Citra, Citra Cryo, and Motueka, and they added purees of mango and bergamot plus lime zest.
The fennel, amchoor, and bergamot contributed the most to the aroma and acidity. The jaggery added a caramel sweetness, but it was the turmeric that wowed another brewer—Nidhi Sharma, who was brewing for London’s Meantime. She tasted it and decided she wanted to brew a pale with me using turmeric.
A lot of drinkers apparently assumed that the turmeric gave the Villages beer its golden color as well as a slight burning sensation. Nidhi’s view is that they were half right—she says it was not the turmeric but the amchoor that provided the burn, which led some tasters to think the beer felt stronger than it was. They thought perhaps 12 percent ABV, while in reality it was 7 percent.
“It’s weirdly luminous,” she says of the color. Turmeric “doesn’t really offer burn as it is not a ‘hot’ spice. If anything, it’s mild.”
When she came to brew our turmeric beer—called Desi Pale Ale—she used turmeric root as well as powder. The effect was startling.
“As the fermentation went on,” Nidhi says, “you could literally smell the changes happening with every passing day. This was so drastic for a beer that was so mildly hopped—most of the hops were for bittering and nothing else.”
Nidhi didn’t expect the turmeric to add much flavor—maybe because of the aforementioned mildness. Yet she wanted to use it because, like me, it played a big part in her childhood in India, and she felt it was part of her heritage.
However—and this is a big however—after tasting the yeast from the bottom of the tank during fermentation, she realized that she was wrong. Turmeric turned out to be a very special addition—because of the turmeric root, not the powder.
“It had such a distinct flavor,” she says. “I was quite surprised that it imparted that flavor to the beer—it was insane. It was the [turmeric] smell, and the yeast had turned yellow, like someone had shone a torch on it. I’d understand if it was in the boil and the beer itself, but the fact that it persisted as the yeast grew itself in the tank [meant] it coated all the new cells.”
Early Lessons
Thinking back on my mother’s cooking: Despite buying huge bags of it, she used turmeric powder more sparingly than other spices in the cupboard, especially dried coriander and cumin. Should the same wisdom apply to brewing with it?
Nidhi says it may depend on your brewing kit, but if you use a lot of powder it may end up floating to the top—even then, however, it should still impart some color.
“I also have a feeling,” she says, “that if you used it wrong—or, let’s say you used it for dry hopping because you want the color in your beer later—then I can see it giving a really powdery, muddy mouthfeel in the beer. It was the first time I was doing this, so that was why I stuck to the boil on the hot side.”
Nidhi also went with Noble and Noble-ish hops—Hallertauer, Saaz, and Willamette—for the pale ale; she wanted a cleaner bitterness and flavors that wouldn’t overshadow the spices. She also included coriander, and some varieties can add an astringent, unpleasant bitterness, so she was careful about which ones she chose.
Despite Nidhi eschewing fruit-forward hops, the finished beer was quite fruity anyway. Nidhi was more than satisfied with the result. “It tasted like wood apple,” she says, “and wood apple is basically cantaloupe on steroids.”
The day I tried Desi Pale Ale in Meantime’s taproom, I was taken aback by how popular the turmeric beer was there. Nidhi found the feedback almost overwhelming—one female customer told her, “I’ve never touched an ale in my life,” but she drank the Desi Pale Ale until it was finished. And, when it was gone, she went back to wine or spirits.
If there’s a lesson to draw from that anecdote, it’s that brewing with turmeric could be just the thing to attract new, curious drinkers—not bad for something I once found shameful in my mum’s spice cupboard.
