Is this a no-no?

I do homebrewing as an hobby, & got inspiration at the Hawaiian Room Resurection last Sept. when i noticed alot of people drinking beer instead of Mai Tais, Zombies, etc... Last November i brewed a prototype beer with peach extract. I know there are alot of beer drinking purist out there that dont like fruit flavorings in there beer, i know, i was one of you, but it turned out great! I used just enough peach extract to give a hint of peach flavoring, but still maintain beer flavor as well. This weekend i'm planing on brewing my tiki beer, a Mango Hefeweizen, is this a tiki no-no? Also I have a kegorator at home with 2 taps, was thinking of having a tiki tap handle (not a vintage tiki), is this a no-no? Your insights would be greatly appreciated!

p.s. if the tiki beer turns out as good as the prototype, i will bring some bottles to tiki oasis for tastings.

sounds great, the beer and the tap handle!
Over in England, when I couldn't find a good pint of guinness, I'd somtimes go for their ciders. It never tasted like you were drinking alcohol.
As far as beer being a tiki no-no...I'll be honest, if I had the choice between a properly poured pint of guinness and a mai-tai...I'd go with the guinness. Usually, that delemma never comes up as you won't find a good pint where good mai tais are and vice versa.

TikiBird~

I've never done homebrewing, but I'd love to sample your suds.

The reason why you saw so many people drinking beer at The Hawaiian Room was simply because the bartender (as hard as she tried), just could not keep up with the overwhelming amount of drinks she had to mix. Remember, The Hawaiian Room, before our gathering, was a quiet bar that had no more than a dozen people in it at one time. So, drinks were easy to handle. The time it took to get a drink became so long at the gathering, that alot of people informally agreed to just order beer so that it was easy for the bartender to get and it would cut the wait time down dramatically.

Honestly, the only way to get a great Mai Tai at any of our get togethers is to have AlnShely, TheJab, DoctorZ, Martiki as well as other TC Mixologists to be the Premier Bartenders of the evening.

Tiki Bird!

Fly on over to the store/shop anytime and I'd be glad to taste your tiki beer for you! (well, after work that is) Mango Hefe sounds awesome!

Crazy Al just did a Tiki Tapper Topper for a customer of ours. He was very pleased.

In my book, this is a Yes-Yes!

p.s. some of our guts can't handle mega doses of rum and acid. King kuku, C'Al and AlnShell have seen this happen to someone before.

[ Edited by: revbambooben on 2004-02-25 10:36 ]

Tiki Bird, any kind of beer in my opinion, is a Tiki No-No. But so what? I do love a good beer. Hefeweizen's are my favorite.

A few months back, I chanced upon Hula Hefeweizen at The Yard House - (from their manufacturer's website) Medium to full-bodied with a pronounced banana/herbal flavor and aroma. This beer's unique flavor profile is a result of the special type of Bavarian yeast strain used to brew the beer. Its manufactured by Kona Brewing Company of Kona, Hawaii. I chose it specifically because the handle pull was a Hula Girl bobbler and it was delicious.

That Mango Hefe sounds good. Maybe I can sample it at the next TC gig? A nice tiki for your bar pull should look really cool. I know Monkeyman has made something similar to this before when he made the legs to his tiki ottoman. You should give him a buzz - would look cool in a home tiki bar.

**Poly-Pop ***

He who dies with the most broken mugs WINS!

[ Edited by: polynesianpop on 2004-02-25 11:27 ]

We recently made our first Hefeweizen from scratch. That banana/clove aroma is just fantastic! We actually added 3 mashed up bananas to enhance the flavor, very tasty!
At some point we will be installing kegs and taps into the regular(non-tiki) bar. We already have the kegs and co2, but we're still looking for some custom tap handles! A tiki one will definitely have to be in the mix.
That mango one sounds good, and since it's a hefe, it'll have the banana and clove undertones. Eeeeexcellent!

If I lived any closer, I'd suggest a trade!

Beer making is an excellent hobby. Once you get all the equipment you can be so creative! We'll be growing hops this year, definitely looking forward to that. Keep on brewing! Never deny yourself a good pint or two.

Save me a pint to sample!

I almost hate to admit it, but I was a fan of the microbrew craze of the 90s.... and I still prefer to order specialty beers when I'm out and craving a brew. Sorry, but a mai-tai just doesn't seem to go well with fish & chips, or the steamed clams & chowder at Longboards.....!

I recently bought a 6 pack of McAuslanes (sp?) apricot beer here in Canada and it was mighty tasty. Just a hint of fruityness.

http://www.bartowel.com/breweries/mcauslan.phtml

here's a link to some ionfo on the apricot beer. Thay also have pumpkin beer!

TikiBird,

I was drinking Bud's that night at the Hawaiian Room resurrection! To me guitar playing and beer go together like my hand and my, er... nevermind.

Not Tiki? Maybe not, but neither is this! (use your imagination).

I am not sure that any rules have been established about beer in Tiki world, other than that if you're in a Tiki Bar, you''d better be drinking a Tropical, or you're just not cool! :)

That said, whenever I'm NOT in Tikiland, good ol' beer is my drink, and I make my own too.

I like beers with fruit accents, as long as they're subtle. There are some very good Belgian cherry beers that I like. Tried my own once; came out pretty good. he key is making it subtle but present. If people are going to drop lemons into their Hefeweizens or limes into their Mexican beers, then why not some other fruit?

I say go for it on the peach beer (not a fan of peach flavors myself, although there was once this girl in Georgia... but I digress), but to each his own. Now the mango, on the other hand... I saw we all bring a case of homebrew to Hukilau or Oasis!

Is Hinano Beer a Tiki no-no? No! No, I say!

Peach is a classic ingredient in Belgian Lambics. I know that Chapeau makes Tropical Lambics like Banana, but I don't know if they do a Mango. I did a quick search on http://www.realbeer.com & found this recipe for a Tropical Fruit Red Ale: all malt, 5 gallons, partial mash with fruit.

I had a friend who made a fantastic Raspberry Ginger Mead, change the raspberry to Mango & your're good to go. I think this is the recipe he based his on.

Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Freelance, Ph.D., D.F.S

[ Edited by: freddiefreelance on 2004-02-25 13:49 ]

SCD, that makes sense. I had forgotten how packed the place was.

RBB, will definitely run by a sixer if it turns out good.

I goin to bottle the beer instead of kegging, due to its easier to hand out. I'm brewing on 2/29, it will take 2-3 weeks in fermentation and 1 month for carbonation before ready to taste. If all goes well should be ready to by 4/21. I'm goin to do a 3 galllon batch with a bavarian type yeast like PolyPop mentioned, so it will have the banana/clove/mango flavor and 3 gallon batch using a american hefeweizen yeast which has no banana/clove flavor. Should have a 3 cases of bottles to pass out at Tiki Oasis. Which ever one taste the best i'll do kegs of it for house tiki beer.

Best beer I ever had was a local micro that made pumpkin beer one Fall.

Tiki Bird,
I am neither a mixologist noe a brewer but it seems to me that any drink with a healthy dose of DYI is worth a try. I figure that most tiki drinks would not exist if not for some brave soul mixing stuff up even if it just don't seem right, like a suffering bastard fer instance. so I say give it a go and hope for the best. as for tiki no no's I'm not even going to pretend to know what those might be, but in life a good rule is "do what thy wilt shall be the whole of the law" with that in mind brew 'em up fruits and all.

maybe you thought I was the packard goose,

Ah...
or even a dose of DIY.
Gaaaaa.

Red Hook Brewery (Seattle based) has some Tiki taps in restaurants. I saw one at the hideous Tiki Bob's here, one at Ohana (I think), and another at some non-Tiki place. Seem to be wood-look cast plastic, Hawaiian Tiki. I don't think it's for a particularly tropical beer.

Don't worry whether anyone thinks beer is Tiki or not. Serve what you want to serve your guests, but more importantly serve them what they want. Of course presentation is a must. Serve it in a Tiki mug, and/or shove an umbrella or two in the glass. If yah wanna get fancy fruit beers can get a skewer of the fruit resting across the glass. With an umbrella, of course.

I could hook you up with a tap, just PM me the size you need, height, width, and I'll get crackin.

I don't know much about beer taps but would the carved parts of the really big tiki forks and spoons be adaptable? It could be their second practical use (after door pulls).

Well did the first tasting of the Mango tiki beer yesterday night, i used a hefeweizen base, added mango extract, & used a bavarian yeast which will impart a banana/clove taste as well. The beer was pretty much on target. It definitely had a mango nose and a subtle mango flavor. Not bad for a young beer. The 17 extra days till oasis iv will only help in flavor. Will do a second tasting on 5/5/04 & if all goes as planned, i will be bring 60 bottles of it to hand out at oasis for anybody interested.

I've always been a fan of ginger beer. You can make your own alcoholic version at home from recipes ranging from Charlie Papazian's to Paul Huson's.

Once you have ginger beer, you can add rum and have a dark-n-stormy.

i love the pumpkin beer too. anyway after a few hours of drinking mai tais and such, i feel like i'm ready to s--t candy canes, gotta have some beer to level out.

The Wells Brewery in the UK makes some fine banana bread beer. No doubt when they combined the banana with the hops and malt, it tasted more like banana bread than banana beer, so named it thusly.

Of course, the Belgians are the real masters of the fruit/beer fusion.

Trader Woody

Hey Trader Woody,
We'll be in the UK week after next. I'll look for the Banana Bread Beer.
Safety warning,be careful when you prime your home brew. I double primed a batch of mine by mistake and when you opened the bottle the brew shot into the air. I named it Vesuvius. Krakatoa might have been closer. Gordon Birsch brews a nice wheat beer with a spice flavors instead of hops.

WOOHOO!!
The Tiki Mango Ale Tiki Bird and I made won the 3rd place ribbon for the Homemade Fruit Beer at the OC Fair this year!

Thanks to all of you for the inspiration!

Wow! What a thrill! Congratulations... I hope there's still a bottle over there with my name on it!?! Keep up the fine brewin'.

-Weird Unc

Congrats on the win! I just read this post, I love mango and would love to have been around to taste your winning beer.

Congrats -- I hope you saved some for me!!!

hey weirduncletiki, i am saving 1 of the last two bottles for you.

Thanks Tiki Toa, if ya ever come to SoCal you can run by my Bar, Ive been keeping a keg of it on tap since oasis.

Polypop, dont worry, it will be on tap at Dr. Z's party.

I guess next up is tryin to do a Kono Coffee/banana chocolate stout.

Tiki Bird, talk to your Homebrew Store guru about creating Phenolic Esters to get Banana flavors into your beer. There're ways to get the flavor without adding mashed Bananas to the Mash Tun. Banana, along with Cloves, is an expected flavor in some German Wheatbeers, especially Berlinner Weiss. Brewers have come up with ways to inculate your beer with the flavor naturally through the fermentation process.

On 2004-07-13 16:36, Tiki Bird wrote:
Thanks Tiki Toa, if ya ever come to SoCal you can run by my Bar, Ive been keeping a keg of it on tap since oasis.

I guess next up is tryin to do a Kono Coffee/banana chocolate stout.

Dude! I am not a coffee drinker but you got me drooling over this recipe idea! And I wish I would have asked sooner if you had any of the bottles left of the mango, darn! And it is guys like you that actually make me consider moving back to Cali, mahalo for the offer if I make out you may be the first one I look up. :wink:

On 2004-07-14 07:50, freddiefreelance wrote:
Tiki Bird, talk to your Homebrew Store guru about creating Phenolic Esters to get Banana flavors into your beer. There're ways to get the flavor without adding mashed Bananas to the Mash Tun. Banana, along with Cloves, is an expected flavor in some German Wheatbeers, especially Berlinner Weiss. Brewers have come up with ways to inculate your beer with the flavor naturally through the fermentation process.

Thanks FFL, will look into, earlier this may i went to the homebrewers festival at Lake Skinner & i tried Long Beach Homebrewers Club's Banana Chocolate Stout in which they used bananas in the mash, & it had a great banana flavor that i feel you can only get thru using real bananas. Would have prefered using real mangos in my Tiki beer but they are not easy to peal & de-seed, & not as cost affective as the extract.

I guess next up is tryin to do a Kono Coffee/banana chocolate stout.

Dude! I am not a coffee drinker but you got me drooling over this recipe idea! And I wish I would have asked sooner if you had any of the bottles left of the mango, darn! And it is guys like you that actually make me consider moving back to Cali, mahalo for the offer if I make out you may be the first one I look up. :wink:

We made this killer Chocolate Espresso Oatmeal stout, I didn't even THINK about bananas! It was really good, I'm hoping to make another batch this fall.

We just started growing hops, but the 4 varities we planted aren't going to produce too much until next year. Fun! Does anyone else grow hops?

On 2004-07-14 13:50, Tikiwahine wrote:

We just started growing hops, but the 4 varities we planted aren't going to produce too much until next year. Fun! Does anyone else grow hops?

Not me, requires alot of hop vines, how high did you set up your vine to climb? Hope you have good hopping.

Tbird.

P.S. will see if Utopiandreem will post a copy of the Mango Tiki Ale Beer label, she did a real good job on it.

Here's the label

[ Edited by: UtopianDreem on 2004-07-15 20:51 ]

On 2004-07-15 19:17, Tiki Bird wrote:

Not me, requires alot of hop vines, how high did you set up your vine to climb? Hope you have good hopping.

Tbird.

About 20 feet I believe. We used two aluminum poles bolted together, with a pulley and rope system at the top so that we can lower them for harvest.
They die down to the ground every year, so even though they're vigorous, they can be cut right back every time. There is no one that provides fresh hops locally, we're going to start trying these 4 varities just for the hell of it!
They are easy to grow, asside from rigging up some kind of trellis system.
Did you know that the hop vines are called 'bines'? Strange!

An ex of mine's best friend's family grew hops in the Yakima Valley in Washington--have you ever seen hops growing on major production scale? It's really something else--picture a massive grape vinyard, if the trellises were made out of telephone poles. Those suckers can get big.

Growing hops always reminds me of the story "Jack in the Bean Stock" man those vines go high, what 4 varities are you growin?

ummm...let's see if I can remember.

Nuggett, Cascade, Centennial and Golding I believe.

They came from Crannog Ales, a great organic brewery that makes, among others, "Backhand of God" stout, http://www.crannogales.com/brewery.html

I'm in the process of creating a tiki beer. The yeast will make the bannana, vanilla, clove flavor. Use Wyeast Weihenstephen Weizen (3068) or White Labs Hef. IV (380). The higher the primary fermentation temperature, the more bannana flaver. Milk this! I used WL380, pumped in 3 gallons of pineapple for a 10 gallon batch in the primary (a conical ss fermentor) then racked to a secondary (glass) on top of 1) 2 pounds of freash mango, and 2) 2 fresh pineapples, and the fruit of 1 fresh coconut. I will let this condition for at least 2 weeks before kegging. The base recipie is a German Bavarian wheat...double decoction mash procedure. Yum! It's a lot of work, and expensive...but I think it's worth it.

Manu dude you gotta hook me up with a bottle of that, I got thirsty and hungry just reading that description!

Manu, how well does the Hefe yeast handle the excess sugars? I looked up the strains & Wyeast says their strain's good for Wheat Bocks, but I don't know enough about the White Labs' strain. Hell, I don't know enough about either, that's why I'm asking you.

Maybe if the German yeast poops out from too much sugar you could try repitching it with a Belgian strain like White Labs' WLP500 or WLP550, or Wyeast's 3724 or 3463?

manu man thats alot of different fruit flavors goin on their, it might come out a little to fruity for a beer. But good luck! Are you in SoCal? Would like to try a sample if so.

Tbird.

The addition of large amounts of sugar (in this case fructose) requires a larger yeast starter. I pitched a 2 quart starter of solid yeast and oxygenated for 2 min with Oxygen. I used a 3rd generation of White Labs yeast, a mix of WLP300 & 380 that I harvested from my conical. My starting gravity was 1.060, the additon of 3 gallons of pinapple juice would of kicked this up to at least 1.065. I racked the brew today, 1 carboy with 1.5 quarts of fresh mango, the other with 1.5 quarts of fresh pinapple. The gravity was 1.008 (% alchol=6.9-7.5%) and the yeast was still working (20 days in the primary). This goes to show that a hefe yeast will continue to work in a high alcohol environment. The best wheat yeast for high alchol is a Belgian Wit. I had one go as high as 11% ABV! Talk about seeing pink tiki's, whew.

[ Edited by: manu man on 2004-07-23 18:13 ]

Tiki Bird-because I put the pineapple in the primary, the result was more alcohol than sweetness. In fact, I tasted the green beer in it was very tart, not sweet at all. My preference is to get the fruit flavor via the secondary fermentation. I use both at times. The bananna and clove component were muted with the additon of pineapple juice. Not my desired result, but then again, this is experimental and we learn from our results. Time will decide on the flavor profile. I've tasted some rank green beer that ended up as my favorite after a couple months. Mabey we shoud make a BJP style guideline for a tiki beer?