Honey Badger Recipe

I'm somewhat dashed that Rogue has released a beer entitled Honey Kölsch. I have been homebrewing a Kölsch style beer with honey for the last three years, and was convinced, perhaps naively, that no one else was doing so. I call mine Honey Badger, although I'm sure that I could never go pro with that name because someone else is undoubtedly using it too. My recipe is a fairly straightforward extract brew, although a small amount of mashing is required. The ingredients and suggestions for making a five gallon batch are as follows:

Grains:
12 oz. 2 row barley
8 oz. torrified wheat
4 oz. flaked maize
4 oz. rice hulls

It's necessary to mash adjuncts like torrified wheat and flaked maize with some 2 row barley instead of just steeping them like specialty grains. These adjuncts need help from the enzymes in the barley to break down their starches into fermentable sugars.

Place cracked grains and rice hulls in a muslin bag. Steep in a gallon of tap water from cold to 155 F in an 8 quart pot. Turn off heat, cover pot, and hold temperature at around 155 F for 40 minutes. Meanwhile, heat up 2 gallons of water in your 20 quart brew kettle. When it reaches 155 F, turn off the heat, cover, and hold the temperature steady in that pot as well.

When the 40 minute mash time is up, remove the grain bag from the 8 quart pot. Place it in a strainer and hold it above the 20 quart brew kettle, allowing excess sugars to drain into the water. Sparge grains with a half gallon of 155 F water from the brewpot as the bag drains. Use caution when pouring hot water over the bag; I use a pyrex measuring cup. Discard the grain bag when you are done sparging. Strain the wort from the 8 quart pot into the brew kettle as well. The total volume of the brew kettle should be roughly 3 gallons. Bring it to a boil in preparation for adding the malt extract.

Extract:
5 lbs. Munton's Extra Light DME added @ 60 min. (Remove pot from heat before you stir in the DME; if you add it to a boiling pot, you're in for a mess. Keep an eye on the pot as you slowly return it to a boil; lower the heat if it starts to foam up.)

Hops:
1 oz. Hallertauer (bittering @ 60 min.)
1 oz. Tettnanger (flavor @ 15 min.)
1 oz. Saaz (aroma @ 5 min.)
1 oz. Saaz (dry hop)

(I typically use Saaz for aroma and dry hop, but I recently substituted German Select and had great results.)

Honey:
2 lbs. of honey added @ 5 min. (I usually use Kallas orange blossom or clover, but I tried their sunflower with my most recent batch and it was nice!)

Yeast:
Wyeast 1007 German Ale

Other Ingredients:
1 tsp. Irish moss (added with the flavor hops 15 minutes before flameout)
water to top off the wort at 5 gallons in the primary fermenter
3/4 cup of corn sugar boiled in 2 cups of water (to prime before bottling)

The starting gravity for this beer should be about 1.060, and it should finish around 1.010. I strongly recommend adding the honey in the last five minutes of the boil, just to pasteurize it. Boiling it for 60 minutes is unnecessary, and will only strip away its wonderful floral qualities. I would also recommend using distilled water for this recipe (with the exception of the gallon of water used to mash the grains; the minerals in tap water are useful during that step). The malt extract should already contain minerals from the water table where it was produced. My tap water is pretty hard, and I avoid using it with extract brews of Pilsners and Kölsch style beers especially. If you're doing all-grain brews, however, you don't want to used distilled water because it lacks some desirable minerals and can decrease your mash efficiency.

The Badger makes for pleasant summer drinking, but it isn't exactly a session beer, as I estimate that my last batch was about 6.6% ABV. I paired it with some grassfed beef burgers that I grilled last weekend. They were topped with smoked Gouda and served on a pretzel bun with dijon mustard and grilled onions. An alt or an amber may have been the logical choice, but Honey Badger held up nicely and paired particularly well with the Gouda. I love Garrett Oliver's recommendations for beer and food pairings, and I think that The Brewmaster's Table should be in every homebrewer and craft beer afficionado's library...but sometimes I'm like the honey badger, and I just don't care.