Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Poi Beer


Poi is one of the most sacred and important dishes in Hawaiian cuisine, and I've been dreaming of finding a way to work it into a homebrew ever since I moved to Honolulu. On Sunday I made my first attempt.

For those who don't know, Poi is a thick, paste-like substance made from the mashed up roots of taro plant. Although I've brewed with starchy root vegetables before--in my Fenton Smith's Sparring Spud Stout (which I consider one of my more successful recipes)--my approach to the use of poi was slightly different. With Fenton Smith's I used potato hoping that it would affect the body and strength of the beer. I wanted the poi to have an affect on both of those characteristics, too, but there's another quality to poi that I wanted to harness: it's lovely purple color. I wondered if there was a way to have that purple color come across in a beer.

I figured my best chance of capturing some degree of the color was to base my recipe on a beer-style known for it's light, nearly-white hue. At first I thought of a hefeweizen, but the truth is I'm not fond enough of that style to want to produce five gallons of it. I decided to start with a grain bill modeled on the Weissbier style, instead. Here are the grains I used:

4 lbs. white wheat malt
4 lbs. Pilsener malt
1 lbs. Munich malt

Another choice dictating my approach relates to the Brew in a Bag article I read in the last issue of Zymurgy, which claims that mashing in the total amount of water planned for the entire recipe results in conversion at least as effective, and sometimes more effective, than the more traditional dense-mash-and-then-sparge approach. So I filled my kettle with six and a half gallons of water, brought it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, and threw in all of the grains and two pounds of poi. (You might be thinking that 165 degrees is pretty high for mashing temperatures, and you'd be right. I brought the water up to that heat because I figured the room-temperature grains and the refrigerated poi would drop it down to mashing range, which it did.)

(For those who were wondering, I got the poi at Fort Ruger Market.. I'd planned on buying a bag, but on the day I was there they only had poi in little containers, and I bought out almost all of their remaining stock, which cost me about eleven dollars.)

So, all the grains and all the poi are in the pot, mashing. First thing I noticed was how viscous poi is--even when dropped in hot water it holds together. I wanted to break it up, thinking that dispersing it more evenly with the grains would give it greater contact with the enzymes in those grains, allowing better conversion (does poi have converting enzymes of its own? I don't know). Although I've heard people caution against disturbing the mash, claiming that stirring will only add more chance for oxidation, I threw that caution to the wind and STIRRED the mofo pot.

When it was all mixed in, I let it sit for another twenty minutes. The temperature dropped a bit, so I turned the flame on low and stirred some more, until it rose back up to 155.

At the end of an hour I drained out the liquid. Absorption from the grains reduced my total volume to lower than what I wanted, so I ran about a gallon of straight-from-the-tap water through them, and put that in with the rest of the liquid in my boil kettle. I probably had around eight gallons to start with.

From there on it was a normal brew. I used cascade hops--an ounce for 60 minutes, a half ounce for 30 minutes, and another half ounce at five minutes to flame-off--because I like cascade and I thought the citrus characteristics would give the beer a more tropical feel.

My original gravity reading came out as 1.047. I don't know if that number indicates conversion of the starches in the poi, or not. I have seen a recipe that used a nearly identical grain bill (minus the poi) and claimed an OG of 1.049, but frankly I'm skeptical. I don't think I've ever gotten gravity that high from nine pounds of grain. Or maybe I'm just really ineffecient.

When the wort was cool enough, I threw it in a 6.5 gallon carboy and pitched the yeast. Twelve hours later it was bubbling heartily, but I noticed something I hadn't expected. Instead of the purple color I'd hoped for, the beer has taken on a slight-green hue. Maybe the grains resulted in a yellowish color, and that blended with the purple to produce green. I don't know. I guess green is sort of cool, but I'm a bit bummed I didn't get purple.

5 comments:

  1. Very cool idea. Please post an update on how it tastes as these experiments are always fun to read about.

    Also can you add a Follow widget or RSS feed?

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  2. Thanks for the interest, Jeffrey. I'll post an update on the Poi beer soon. I also added a "subscribe" gadget to my blog. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "Follow widget or RSS feed"--I'm pretty ignorant about this sort of thing. I noticed that blogger has a "follow by email" gadget, and I can put that up instead of the subscribe button if people prefer it. Like I said, I don't know much about this sort of stuff.

    And by the way, I visited your blog and thought it was awesome, so I added a link to it on the "Fellow Brewers" part of my blog. I hope that's okay.

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    1. Perfect, any of those subscription widgets works.

      Thanks, it has been a fun adventure keeping with it the last few years. I find it is a good way to help me solidify ideas and also is a base for collaboration. I get a lot of creative inspiration from readers and other blogs.

      I actually found yours through Danny and Chris. Keep up the good work.

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  3. The pigments in taro turn green at high pH. I bet your beer was pink by the time the yeast finished?

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    1. Nah, it turned out pale yellow, like straw. Thinking back on it now, I think the initial green color was probably just from all the suspended hops--I used pellet hops instead of the whole hops, and pellet hops break into tiny particles when they hit the hot wort (whereas whole hops don't).

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