Beer Forum

I'm going to give brewing with hazelnuts a try. My current plan is to do a cereal mash, and then add them to the main mash.. If anyone has success with another method, please share

Last year's Iron Brewer contest in my homebrew club was nuts. Some turned out really good. Some not

I can not remember the details.

I brewed an oatmeal chocolate peanut butter stout a while ago and it was ok (so, nut butter instead of strait nuts). I used natural peanut butter and let the oil separate for a while and put paper towels on it to wick off as much oil as I could, then added it at flame out. There was definitely a peanut aspect to the beer, not sure if that was a good thing or not. The biggest problem I saw as head retention was almost completely destroyed. I brew the base beer regularly so I know what the head usually looks like.

Maybe toasting the nuts whole and adding them would work better. My only thought on adding it to the mash might be that the boil would blow off all the nutty aromatics you might want to get from the nuts in the finished product.

I'm not worried about head retention, I don't think there is any chance of keeping that. Maybe I'll try doing a one gallon test batch in the kitchen this week.

There is some sort of powdered peanut butter that I have heard works well for beer, but I have never used it. Might be worth looking into.

Rogue does a hazelnut beer. Might be fruitful to email john and ask for tips.

If you are not overly concerned with tradition and wish to experiment with successful results then you should give Olive Nation pure extracts a shot. They make a hazelnut extract which is quite potent and meant for use in beer and baking. They are expensive but will retain your base beer characteristics (i.e. head retention) without all of the hassle (and hit or miss) of using the actual nuts. Just something to consider. I do believe Doc brewed his NHC gold medal Northern English brown ale with hazelnut extract so it must be worthwhile.

I did a macadamia nut porter last year that turned out pretty good. I rinsed the salt off and toasted the nuts in the oven till they were golden then rough chopped them and threw them in near the beginning of the mash. The beer had good "nut" flavor for about 2 weeks then just like dry hops it died off and I was left with a nice porter minus the nuts. I think the extract idea is a good one to try too as you can dial in the level of nuttyness as well.

Cheers