How to Make Nettle Beer Recipe | Homestead Honey (2024)

FAQs

How do you make beer with honey? ›

To carbonate a 5 gallon batch of beer with honey, you can typically replace 5 oz of priming sugar and use 1 cup of honey. Bring 16 oz of water to a boil. Add the 1 cup of honey to the boiling water and stir vigorously. Add this honey solution to the bottom of your bottling bucket, then rack your beer on top of it.

Aside from making a somewhat pleasant drink, stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) are a great source of vitamin C and apparently help alleviate rheumatic pain.

Simply add the nettle leaves to the water and bring to the boil. The tea can be made stronger or weaker by adding more, or less, water. Once the water has been simmering for a few minutes strain the mixture into a cup, being sure that no nettles go through the strainer.

Quickly blanching them in a pot of boiling water will deaden the sting. But leave them for too long and - like spinach - the leaves will wilt too far, and start to lose flavour, texture and goodness. Treat the cooked nettle leaves as you would treat cooked spinach leaves.

Since honey is 95% fermentable, most of the sweetness in honey will be lost unless added at later stages in the boil. If you want a subtle honey flavor, add honey between 10 to 30 minutes left in the boil.

Mead (/miːd/), also called hydromel (particularly when low in alcohol content), is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water, and sometimes with added ingredients such as fruits, spices, grains, or hops. The alcoholic content ranges from about 3.5% ABV to more than 20%.

The real strength of honey is that it adds potency and lightness to beer, as other sugars do, yet smoothes out the roughness that inevitably comes from adding sugar. We've found that honey also seems to knock the bitter edge off the hops while allowing some of the more subtle hop character to come through.

Avoid if you're pregnant or breastfeeding because there isn't enough information on its safety. Use with caution if you're elderly because of the potential of causing low blood pressure. And use stinging nettle with caution if you have diabetes because of the potential that it may lower or raise blood sugar levels.

The resulting beer that you get from home-brewing with nettles tends to be sweet in flavour and more like cider in structure. But once fermented, bottled and cooled down, it is a glorious thirst-quencher.

How much alcohol is in nettle beer? ›

- 500ml. A member of our Standard beer range, find out more on our Nettle IPA page.

Packed with a variety of polyphenolic compounds and pigments, nettle leaf detox drinks reduce liver inflammation. A regular cleanse with nettle leaf detox drinks can help lower blood pressure and improve the heart's antioxidant defenses.

With fresh leaves, experiment with the ratio of nettle to water you prefer, but a general reference is two cups of water for every cup of leaves. Here's how: Add water to the leaves. Bring the water just to a boil.

IF USING FRESH NETTLES: Strip the nettle leaves from the fibrous stem using leather garden gloves. Wash the leaves thoroughly (it may require several washings). Steam until the nettles are tender yet still vibrantly green. Let the nettles cool with the lid off.

Freezing – either steam or boil nettles until just cooked, rinse in cold water, let drain and place in freezer bags for later use.

Nettle wine recipe

Let the nettles cool and squeeze any remaining liquid into the fermenter. Dissolve the sugar in the hot liquid and add the lemon juice. Make up to about 5 litres with cold water, and add the wine yeast when it has cooled to body temperature.

Fill three-quarters of the bucket with water to allow room for the foam that will be created during the brewing process. Leave for 3 – 4 weeks to brew, stirring every couple of days. Tip: It can be a bit smelly so keep it somewhere away from the house. Once brewed, dilute the nettle concentrate 1:10 parts water.