If your favorite beer comes from a beer store, you may never have experienced the overwhelming pleasure of savoring your own homemade beer.
Sure, the commercial stuff is OK. But if you want the soul-stirring satisfaction of sipping a delicious beer that you’ve made yourself, you’ll want to try the world’s most popular home beer recipe, Goat Scrotum Ale.
Goat Scrotum sounds utterly gross, doesn’t it? The truth is that it’s a beer that everyone enjoys. One of the reasons it’s so popular is that it can be brewed in a variety of ways and in many custom flavors. If you like chocolate, you can make it taste like bitter-sweet chocolate. You may prefer a fruity-gingery ale, a palate-popping spicy blend or a smooth, fragrant brew. There are hundreds of possible combinations and creating your own personal varieties is a fascinating hobby.
Goat Scrotum Ale became wildly popular back in the early 1800s when it was known as “Tumultuous Porter”. The deeply satisfying ale continued to be a great favorite of beer drinkers until prohibition came along and the brew and its recipe disappeared. Lucky for us, the recipe was brought back to an appreciative world of home brewers by a researcher named Charles Papazian.
Making Goat Scrotum Ale the Papazian way was pretty exciting, to say the least! Here are the Papzian ingredients:
5 lbs dark malt extract
1 lb crystal malt
1/4 lb each black patent malt and crushed roasted barley
3 1/2 oz Hallertauer leaf hops
1 cup each brown sugar and blackstrap molasses
1 lb corn syrup
2 tspns gypsum
1 tspn Irish Moss
1 pkg ale yeast
3/4 cup corn sugar to prime the bottle with
To customize your ale and create your very own specialty brew you may use these optional ingredients in whatever combination you wish:
2 to 4 oz freshly grated ginger root
Up to 2 inches brewing licorice
2 tbspns spruce tree essence
1 to 10 dried chili pepper
1/4 cup slightly crushed juniper berries
6 oz unsweetened Bakers chocolate or cocoa powder
Following are Mr. Papzian’s directions:
Steep the crystal malt in the brewing water for one hour at 150F. Remove leftover crystal malt and mix in dark malt extract, brown sugar, blackstrap molasses and a pound of the corn sugar.
Bring to a soft boil until all the ingredients are dissolved completely. Add in a quarter ounce of hops and the optional ingredients you choose to use. Boil fifteen minutes. Then, add a half ounce hops and boil another fifteen minutes.
Toss in the black patent malt and crushed roasted barley. Boil for another
fifteen minutes. Add another quarter ounce hops and the gypsum and Irish Moss. Boil for thirteen minutes. Now stir in the remaining ounce and a half of hops, boiling for two more minutes.
Allow the wort to cool to room temperature. Strain carefully while transferring the liquid into the fermenter. When the wort’s temperature falls below 80F, stir in the yeast.
And finally, when the wort has completely finished fermenting, add the three-quarters cups of corn sugar.
You’re now ready to put your delicious creation into bottles and look forward to that first tantalizing sip.