Upon the completion of a variety of equipment construction projects, we brewed our inaugural batch: a chai spiced wheat beer, with the working title of White Sky.
Both Matt and I are big chai fans, and after a good amount of research on the subject of chai beers we’ve realized that no one has ever really made a commercially successful one. Of the small few instances we’ve found, almost all of them are darker styles such as brown ales or porters. We figure that if you can make a white ale with orange peel and coriander, why not one with cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, black pepper, and ginger?
The brew went incredibly smoothly with the addition of a mash tun we built using a cooler (via instructions from this website). This is easily the first time we’ve brewed with such precision.
The beer turned out far better than we had expected, given the level of experimentation. Our one noticeable problem is the fact that we used fresh ginger, which compared to the other dried spices quickly got mushy and developed a mildly astringent taste. We’ll be using dried ginger for future batches.
