The below recipes are from a brew duel where the secret ingredient was Semolina, and the chosen style was a braggot.
Abigail’s Recipe – Braggotelli
Before brewing this, Kyle and I had established that semolina really didn’t taste like much. The most success I had with it was adding raw acini pasta to some mead – it ended up tasting like pasta (albeit not much like mead anymore). Cooking the pasta, using orzo, and using semolina flour itself all turned out worse.
So I was aiming for as light a flavor as possible (no hops, no boil, light dme and honey).
I also shot for something relatively sweet – in testing beforehand, adding the pasta had taken a regular mead much drier. I didn’t want to have to backsweeten, so aggressively aimed to stop it early instead.
Primary:
- 450g bavarian wheat dme
- 480g basswood honey
- 80g vienna malt
- 120g flaked oats
- Water to 1gal
- Steep vienna malt & oats @65C for 30min
- Add dme, let it dissolve but don’t boil
- Add honey
Yeast: fleischman’s bread yeast, pitched dry with no nutrient.
SG 1.093.
Fermented for 9 days, then racked and stabilized w potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite. FG 1.027; 8.76% abv.
At this point, it tasted fine. (notes from the time: “not too dry but not overly sweet, does just taste like beer mixed with mead. A little 1-dimensional… could use some bittering?”)
Separated ~1L of it (didn’t want to ruin the rest), and racked it onto about 300g of raw acini pasta. Also threw in a bay leaf.
Left it on the pasta for a bit under a week.
On the night of the meetup, I tasted it & wasn’t super happy, so backsweetened with about a tsp of honey. But that overdid it – at the meetup I thought it was too sweet. The pasta flavor also didn’t come through as strongly as it had in earlier testing (I’d used less pasta proportionally).
