This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by FinalGravity) is:

“What indigenous brewing ingredient have you used or would you like to brew with and what style would that beer be?”

I’ll be honest, when I first read this topic, I had absolutely no clue what to write about. I tried to think of exotic ingredients from other countries and crazy beer styles I could make with them. Aaaand I came up with nothing.

So then I started to think about indigenous ingredients from my current home state of Pennsylvania. Hmm… what grows in PA? Pumpkins, yeah, but everyone makes pumpkin ales, so that’s pretty boring.

Then, I thought of a friend of mine who grew up on an apple farm in PA, and I suddenly remembered our attempt at making an apple ale two years ago. Bam! Blog post.

Okay, I apologize, because I know this isn’t the most exciting ingredient. It doesn’t even technically fit the topic, because apples originated in Asia… But apples have been in this country since the 1600s, and the US is the second largest producer (next to China)… So I’m calling it indigenous enough!

We bought all kinds of apples from the local orchard – Gala, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Jonagold, Winesap… We tried to get a nice balance of sweet and tart. If I remember correctly, we chopped them up, put them in a giant mesh bag, and boiled them with our wort.

So, there’s a reason I used the word “attempt” when referring to our apple ale before. This was in the early days of Weber brewing, back before I was even a Weber, so we were still in the learning phase. We had a problem with the siphon, and somehow didn’t see the issue with sucking on the end of the siphon to get it going. Yeah, dumb.

Needless to say, we had a bit of a sanitation problem, and our apple ale tasted like more like rotting apple cider.

But you know what? The spirit was there. We got high quality, fresh, local apples, with the intention of making something truly great and unique. Unfortunately, it turned out to be epic fail.

But like I said, the spirit was there…