If you want to try a beer that is a little bit different then have you ever considered trying one that is flavored with strawberries. Strawberry beer is not as many would think the fermented juice of strawberries but the juice is in fact added to a normal beer. Many people that the sweet flavors of the strawberries of the complemented by the bitterness of the beer to which it has been added.



Although this flavor beer is readily available and can be purchased through various beer outlets and online have you ever considered making your own. A quick search online there are plenty of sites offering you recipes so that you can try and make your own strawberry beer if you want.

However, before you do start to make your own beer whether flavored with strawberries or not you need to make sure that you have the right equipment. For a home brewing kit you will need a large stainless steel pot, a large glass bottle (carboy), some tubing, a funnel and large bucket all made from food grade plastic. Plus you will also need a large wooden spoon, a siphon rake, a thermometer and valve for the carboy. These items can easily be purchased online or from a specialist home brewing supplier near where you live.

After you have this equipment together you now need to get the ingredients together to make your strawberry beer with. For this you need strawberries, amber hopped syrup, dry light malt, crushed crystal malt, leaf hops, and pectin enzyme and ale yeast starter.

Now that you have all these items you can move on to actually beginning to brew your own beer. Below are the steps you will need to follow in order to make one that is flavored with strawberries.

Step 1 - The first thing that you need to do is make up the yeast starter which will be incorporated into the beer at a later stage. To do this take a quart of water and add to it a cup of dry malt extract and then bring the water up to boiling point. Then take of the heat and let the mixture cool, once it has cooled to 90 degrees Fahrenheit you need to add the ale yeast to it stirring vigorously as you do before leaving it to stand for two hours.

Step 2 - Whilst the mixture above is standing steep the crystal malt in a gallon of water then rinse it thoroughly using a further 1 to 1.5 gallons of preboiled water. Then into a pot you put the hops, malt and a 1 to 1.5 gallons of water and bring it to the boil and then let it boil for the next hour.

Step 3 - After an hour you need to turn the heat down underneath the pot and into this you mix the strawberries which have been washed, destemmed and pureed. Mix the ingredients together thoroughly and allow the mixture to heat through for the next 15 to 20 minutes. After this time you need to remove the hops and allow the mixture remaining known as wort to cool.

Step 4 ? Once the wort has cooled place into the carboy with some cold bottled water added to it and then add into the yeast starter and either on the same day or the next you need to add the pectin enzyme. Now leave to ferment before you rack it (put it into the plastic bucket). The strawberry beer should then be left in the bucket for between 3 and 4 days before it is then bottled.