Habenero Pale

The base recipe was taken from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I upped the OG (I think this works better as a sipping beer) and lowered bitterness to account for addition of spice from Habenero peppers. The benefit to using the prescribed method is that you get very little of the bitter vegetable pepper flavor transferred to the tincture, just the capsaicin. Leaving the seeds in the tincture for an extended period of time will cause some of these flavors to transfer.

I follow the mash profile in the recipe, and do a warm water pour over sparge through a strainer with 1 gallon of the adjusted water, with the grain sitting in a large strainer above my boil kettle. After I chill my wort to about 80F, I transfer to my fermenter and aerate with a spoon for 3 minutes. I then add chilled distilled water to get the OG where I want it, usually about 1.5 gal, but this depends on your boil off rate. Pitch yeast and let it ride! I recommend using a blow-off tube for the first 2 days if you don't have the recommended 25% head space in your fermenter. Using US-05 with this gravity can get pretty violent.

To add the spice, I de-seed about 30 Habeneros and soak the seeds for 1 week in about 2 cups of Tito's vodka. After fermentation is complete and you're ready to package, measure out 1 cup of beer in a glass and slowly add the spiced vodka tincture in measured amounts, tasting the beer each time until you like the level of spice (I have an old graduated medicine syringe that I use to measure the tincture with). Then scale up that amount to your finished volume of beer! Each time I brew this I end up adding a different amount of tincture to achieve the same level of spice