I've been paging through Stephen Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers and eyeballing the recipe for sage ale on pp. 197–98 for quite a while now. This brew recipe is adapted a fair amount from the recipe Buhner published, but then, Buhner himself encourages improvisation in the first appendix to the book, so I don't feel at all bad about that.

This is a partial-boil procedure: I'm performing the boil in our five-gallon pot while also conducting the boil for batch 097B on another burner in the large brew pot at the same time. I'm planning on pouring this into the five-gallon carboy, since there are no hops, and using a gallon or two of plain water to bring up the gravity, then adding sugar if necessary to bring the gravity up.

I'm going to call this brew Desert Island Sage after Michael Pallin's It's-Man who introduces so many episodes of the Flying Circus.

BeerXML for this recipe, generated by BrewTarget.

This sage ale is starting to ferment, too.

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Ingredients in this batch

  • approx. 1.5 gallons third-runnings wort from batch 097
  • 3.3 lb. Briess CBW® sparkling amber LME
  • 15.9 oz. dark brown sugar
  • 1 lb. corn sugar
  • 1 oz. dried powdered culinary Albanian sage from Penzeys Spices at 60 min.
  • 2 oz. dried licorice root at 60 min.
  • ½ oz. dried powdered culinary Albanian sage from Penzeys Spices in fermenting vessel.
  • ½ oz. dried powdered culinary sage from Imperial Spices in fermenting vessel.
  • 1 packet (11.5 g) Safale S-05, rehydrated in ½ cup water at 100℉

Procedure

Sparged the grain from batch 097 again, resulting in about three gallons of wort at 1.012—well into diminishing returns territory. Added water and a can of malt extract to bring the boil volume to five and a half gallons, then boiled for an hour. Tossed in an ounce of dried sage and all the licorice root at the beginning of the boil, then, at flame-out, cooled the wort with the immersion chiller, then poured the partial boil into the large brew pot (which I had, by then, emptied and cleaned), intending to use the volume measurements on the inside to determine how much (if any) additional sugar and water to add.

Unfortunately, I hadn't quite closed the drain valve all the way when I'd cleaned the pot, and I lost about three-quarters of a gallon of wort while I was looking the other way. Which (a) made it necessary to add more fermentable sugar and water than I had planned to bring up the volume and gravity; and (b) was a whole lot of fun to clean up, especially because I also dropped a hydrometer when I saw what was happening.

This brought the total post-boil volume of wort down to just over three gallons. Added a pound of brown sugar and a pound of corn sugar to the fermenting vessel in addition to the last ounce of powdered sage, then poured about a gallon of dechlorinated tap water over it. Emptied the boiled wort into the fermenter without filtering at all—there's plenty of boiled sage and licorice root in the fermenter. This is intentional: I want to maximize the extraction of both herbs during fermentation, as the alcohol level rises.

Aerated in the brew pot before and during pouring, and by splashing as the wort moved between vessels, and by sterring vigorously thrown the carboy neck with the very long spoon. Pitched the yeast and put in a blowoff hose.

Brew day: 8 February 2018
Original gravity: 1.042
Estimated IBUs: 0
Predicted final gravity 1.011
Predicted ABV: 4.2%
Bottling day: 29 March 2018
Final gravity: 1.006
Estimated ABV: approx. 4¾%

Yield:

  • 25 x 12 oz. beer bottles
  • 3 x 375 mL beer bottles
  • 1 x 500 mL beer bottle
  • 8 x 22 oz. beer bottles
  • 1 x 750 mL beer bottle
  • hydrometer tube

Total yield: approx. 562 fl. oz., or about 4⅓ gal.

Observations

  • 2017-02-09T11:31: There's some carbon dioxide production in the carboy, but not as much as in batch 097. Still, there's some carbon dioxide production.
  • 2017-02-11T02:17: Carbon dioxide production is much faster now. There's regular, rapid bubbling coming out of the air hose at this point.