Spicing Up Your Holidays: Brown Ale Homebrew Recipe (2024)

As the holidays approach, many home brewers are looking for a great recipe to share with their friends and families as a holiday ale. Unfortunately, it’s already November, which means that it is most likely too late to brew the high-gravity “winter warmer” that you were considering.

With under two months to go until Christmas, any home brewer who hasn’t already brewed their holiday ale needs a holiday ale recipe that is quick to brew, delicious, and reminiscent of the season.

Enter the Holiday Brown Ale.

This easy and delicious holiday ale will be the talk of any holiday party this winter, as the blend of spices, roasted malt, and orange peel will bring out the holiday in everyone, but the key to brewing this beer is in not overdoing the spices.

3 Methods for Adding Spices

There are a lot of methods for adding spices to home brewed beer. Here, we’ll go over a few approaches and the pros and cons of each method, along with some recommendations on beers for which they work best.

1. Adding Spices to the Boil Kettle

The best part of this method is that it is remarkably consistent if you are consistent in your method. For instance, if you always add one tablespoon of coriander with ten minutes of boil time left, you will get a pretty consistent result each time.

2. Adding Spices to Secondary Fermentation

This is essentially the same as dry-hopping, except you are adding spice instead of hops. To sanitize your oak or spices prior to adding to secondary, you can steam the ingredients or simply soak them in enough vodka to cover them and then dump the vodka and spices into the fermenter when racking your beer to secondary.

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The downside to this method is a higher risk of contamination and a risk of over-spicing your beer. What seems like a small addition of spices can actually contribute a lot of flavor as the alcohol in the beer acts as a solvent and pulls more flavor than expected out of the spices.

For that reason, it is generally better to start small and add more if needed rather than to use the full amount you expect from the beginning.

The risk of contamination comes from two sources. The first is if you do not adequately sanitize the ingredient prior to adding to secondary. The second risk comes from the fact that you will have to periodically sample the beer to make sure you have not aged it too long on the ingredient. If you have a fermentation vessel that has a sampling port on the side, you may be able to alleviate some of this risk, but not many people utilize ported fermentation vessels at home.

There is another downside to this method, as well, and that is time. It takes longer to add flavor to your beer in secondary than it would by boiling the spices, as you may need several weeks in secondary to get the flavor you’re seeking.

This method can be very useful when adding things such as oak or vanilla, and works especially well if you have a way to sanitize the ingredient before adding it. Vanilla porter and oak-aged barley wine work really well for this as long as you taste the beer periodically while it ages.

3. The Spice Tea Method

To get the benefits of both of the above methods, you can utilize the Spice Tea Method, in which you brew a small batch of tea using your spices and then add it to your beer just before bottling. This method is a bit more complicated than the other two methods, but it bears great fruit in repeatability and predictability of the result. In addition, you reduce the risk of contamination and maintain the shorted time possible from boil kettle to finished product.

This method is a bit more complicated than the other two methods. To perform it correctly, you will need to utilize small-scale sampling and a little bit of math to ensure you get the flavor you want.

For instance, this Holiday Ale recipe makes five gallons of brown ale and utilizes vanilla, cinnamon, orange peel, and fresh ginger. To add the spice flavors, you’ll add all four ingredients to a quart of water, bring to a boil, and steep for 10-15 minutes.

Holiday Brown Ale Recipe (All Grain Version)

Below, you’ll find the Holiday Brown Ale recipe and more detailed instructions for making the spice tea at bottling.

Recipe Specs
Batch Size:	5 Gallons
Volume Boiled:	6 Gallons
Original Gravity (OG):	1.058
Final Gravity (FG):	1.014
SRM:	22
IBUs:	38
ABV:	5.8%

Ingredients:

10 lbs. 2 Row Base
8 oz. 90 L Crystal Malt
8 oz. 60 L Crystal Malt
6 oz. Chocolate Malt
1 oz. Black Patent Malt
0.1 oz. 5% Alpha Acid Glacier Hops for 60 minutes (5 AAU)
0.75 oz. 5.7% Cascade hops for 10 minutes
1 oz. 5.7% Cascade hops for 15 minutes
0.75 oz. 5.7% Cascade hops for 5 minutes
1 tsp. Irish moss for 15 minutes
2 packs Fermentis Safale US-05 dry yeast (or a starter). You can also use Wyeast 1056 American ale yeast or White Labs WLP001.

At bottling:

1 Tbs. Orange Peel, Bitter
1 Vanilla Bean
1 Cinnamon Stick
1 Tbs Fresh Ginger
5 oz. Corn Sugar (if priming)

Procedure:

Mash at 150°F for an hour or until starches are converted. Mash out at 170°F and sparge to kettle volume of 6 gallons. Bring to a boil and add the first hop addition. Boil for 45 minutes and then add 1 Tsp. Irish Moss. Boil 5 more minutes, and then add Challenger Hops. Boil 10 more minutes, and then turn off heat and add Cascade hops. Chill beer to 70°F and pitch yeast. Ferment for 7-10 days until fermentation is completed.

At bottling, make a spiced tea to add to the fermented beer prior to carbonation by following these steps:

Add a quart of water to a saucepan with the Orange Peel and cinnamon.
Slice open the vanilla bean lengthwise, open it up, and scrape the inside of the bean with a knife to get all of the good vanilla flavor. Add this and the bean’s husk to the water.
Peel and chop the fresh ginger. Add this to the water.
Bring the mixture to a boil then remove from heat and steep for 10-15 minutes.
Once it has steeped, filter the liquid out of the remaining spices into a sanitized container (a sanitized French press is ideal for straining solids).

Some brewers may feel confident in adding the entire amount of the tea to their beer at this point, but in order to prevent over-spicing the beer, it is better to build small samples of spiced beer and then use some basic math to scale the quantity up to the full batch size.

Measure out 100 mL of the finished beer and add this three clean glasses.
Measure out some varying amounts of spice to add to the samples. Typically, I use 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 mL in each respective 100 mL sample.
Once you have added the spice tea to the 100mL samples, taste them from least spiced to most spiced, and decide which version tastes the best to you.
Once you have that ratio, scale the preferred amount up to suit your five gallon recipe. If you aren’t sure which of two versions you like more, split the difference and use that number.

To scale the number of mL per 100mL sample to the number of cups per 5 gallon batch, you can simply multiply the mL of spice tea by 0.8 to get the number of cups to add to the 5 gallon batch. I’ve done the math for three sample sizes below:

1.5mL x 0.8 = 1.2 cups per 5 gallons
2.5mL x 0.8 = 2.0 cups per 5 gallons
3.5mL x 0.8 = 2.8 cups per 5 gallons

So, you would add 2.8 cups of spice tea to the five gallon batch if you liked the 3.5 mL sample best.

Once the spices are added, you can force carbonate in the keg or add the priming sugar for bottling, and then package your beer.

Happy brewing!