With the basics sorted, and your techniques perfected, you can start giving your beers a bit of personality. The sky’s the limit when it comes to ingredients you can throw into the mix.
“I’ve seen people experiment with liquorice, lime and elderberries,” Mervyn says.
“One brewer made a ‘sour mash’ using natural enzymes by leaving the malt in the open air of Singapore and then allowed it to ferment with whatever Mother Nature gave.” Raymond recalls. “It was interesting, but I won’t drink it.”
Timothy has seen plenty of interesting beers, but says that “interesting” is a relative term to homebrewers.
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“We are usually avid craft beer drinkers so we are used to seeing a myriad of delightful and slightly strange beers that we gladly partake in. What is normal to us may seem unusual to casual beer drinkers – beers like oyster stouts, sour beers and chili beers are just some that come to mind.”
For more information and to get your DIY beer kits, check out iBrew’s website (http://www.ibrew.com.sg/). To get involved with Singapore’s homebrewing community, link up with the Singapore Craft Brew Club (http://singapore-craft-brew-club.com/) or join the Singapore Homebrew Meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/Singapore-Homebrew).
Hiasa Kyte is a contributor to Straatosphere. From absinthe to zinfandel, Hiasa drinks it all. While he knows his way around grand old whiskies and Bordeaux First Growths, he gets his real kicks trying unheralded booze found on the dusty lower shelves of the alcohol world.