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: A Black Rock Mexican Lager beer kit. 1kg of Coopers brewing sugar. About 20 red chillis. 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.