Beer Forum

So I am thinking about making an Arnold Palmer beer. My hope is to brew two separate beers; one with black tea (Arnold) and one shandy (Palmer). When I bottle I plan on bottling these beers in three ways. Both the Arnold and the Palmer individually for blending and then keg the Arnold and Palmer together. I plan on using 9 lbs pilsen malt and 1 oz Hallertau hops as the base beer. For the Arnold I plan on using 6 Luzianne tea, as for the Palmer I am thinking 1 gallon "fancy" store bought lemonade in the last few minutes of the boil. As for yeast I am thinking of US-05. Has anyone tried using black tea or lemonade in a beer?

Lemonade/Shandy's aren't too uncommon. Never heard of a black tea beer, but I have heard of several green & white tea beers. Sounds like an interesting experiment. I'd be really curious at how the black tea beer turns out on it's own. Sounds like it could be a tough ingredient to write a recipe around, but it also sounds like it could be fantastic done right. Keep us updated!



Edit: I've never done a shandy cause I don't really care for them very often, but IIRC the lemonade is typically added in the fermenter, post ferment I believe.

I'd suggest finding a good quality leaf tea to use for your arnold beer.

There are five main grades for classifying tea and these are:
Dust –D This is the lowest grade in the classification of Black tea. Actually it consists of small pieces of tea leaves and tea dust.
Fanning This consists mainly of pieces of tea leaves. It is a low grade.
BOP – Broken Orange Pekoe This consists of small tea leaves or pieces of large Leaves.
It is considered a medium grading for the classification of tea leaves.
OP - Orange Pekoe This consists of large, whole tea leaves picked without the flower bud of the tea plant.
FOP – Flowery Orange Pekoe These are the whole tea leaves together with the flowering tea plant.

Lousianne and other larger tea companies usually use Dust or Fanning. You can get the BOP and OP for loose leaf tea very commonly and they are often much higher quality.

Alton Brown and his Show good eats has a whole episode about tea and the different gradings. Might be a good resource for learning about the tea before using it.

Great info Theo! I always wondered what those letters meant. Our co-op grocery store has dozens of large jars of bulk loose leaf & some of them are marked like that IIRC. I'm going to have to take a closer look the next time I go there in the spring. I like to make a blend of 4 of their teas to do sun tea all summer. Now I wonder what grade of tea I've been buying.

Here. This is my all time favorite cooking show because he explains the science and chemistry and history behind foods to teach you why you do what you do in recipes.

He even has an episode about home brewing. But don't ever watch it because he makes a lot of mistakes and it will frustrate most home brewers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npFAFX04ROE

That is a link to the episode on tea.

theobrew wrote:He even has an episode about home brewing. But don't ever watch it because he makes a lot of mistakes and it will frustrate most home brewers.

+1

Nice tip theo! I work at a coffee shop and I think I'm going to try to use some of their black tea for this. Any idea on how many bags I should do?

No Idea... I'd probably do something similar to how I make sweet tea though where I brew a small very strong tea and dilute it about 5-6x and add sugar.

If you make a small amount of really strong tea you can add it to taste at the end of fermentation. Also you wont loose any of that tea aroma from the yeast working.