I live close to a small nature reserve that is there to preserve a piece of typical Swedish forrest, low in nutrients and with lots of small bogs. Despite being only a couple of kilometers across, it has very varied and beautiful nature and I always feel refreshed after a walk there. I have long been trying to come up with a beer that reminds me of walking this forrest. This summer, as the bog myrtle was fresh, I decided to collect some and make a sort of modern gruit.

I went there on a rainy day and collected a bag of fresh leaves, taking mostly the softer tips to avoid the woodier stems. I wanted as fresh flavor as possible for this beer, but of course the stems would probably have made excellent beer too.

When I came home I put most of the leaves in the freezer to preserve until beer-making time and then I made a tea with a couple of leaves to test their pungency and see what kind of flavor they contributed. I noted it to be pungent and aromatic, with a sage-like herbalness and a minty bitter aftertaste. I decided I did not want the myrtle to contribute all the bitterness in this beer, but that I also wanted to use hops for both flavor and aroma. I also felt the flavor was a bit too bog-like so I decided to add some berries to bring some fresh tartness to the beer. Going with a nordic theme, and wanting to use things that grow in the same forrest, I decided to try lingonberries. I also decided to make small batches with bilberries (Swedish blueberreis), rose hips and finally one without berries. Having decided on this I figured I should use a simple malt base and I also opted for a belgian yeast I know I like to give the beer some supporting esters.

Recipe

OG: 1.064

FG: 1.009

IBU: 22 (plus whatever the myrtle added)

Mash: 66C mash in, leave overnight

93% Pilsner

7% Honey (added to boil)

0.7 g/l Magnum, 30 minutes

1.3 g/l Bog Myrtle, 30 Minutes

1.3 g/l EKG, 15 minutes

7.5 g/l Bog Myrtle, 1 minutes

30 g/l Lingonberries or 80 g/l Bilberries or 20 g/l dried rose hips

M47 Belgian Abbey Yeast, fermented at 19C for 3 days, then at 22C for another week.

Brew day

The day before brew day, I milled my grains, heated the full volume of water and added the grains in a mesh bag. I wrapped the bucket in i couple of blankets and left overnight. The next day I removed the grains and started heating the wort in my kettle.

The pot, just coming up to a boil, with the first small addition of myrtle.

I thawed the berries, and brought them up to 80C to pasteurize them. Then I mashed them up in order to get most of the flavors out.

Like I usually do, I fermented a couple of small 1L batches in PET bottles. These held my alternative beers. I opted to add the berries loose to the fermenters at the same time I pitched the yeast. I later regretted adding the berries loose as I lost a bit of beer at bottling. Next time I am going to add the berries in mesh bags. Anyway, fermentation happened, and I bottled with priming sugar as usual.

Impressions

The lingonberry beer is the biggest success. It has a slight pinkish hue to it that I failed to capture properly with the camera. A few weeks after the photo was taken, it cleared up further and was pretty bright. Since I did not use any enzyme, my best guess is that it took some time for the pectins to drop out.

The smell is one of resinous and piney herbs. There is a whif of berries too. The flavor starts with tart berries and then the pine and herbs hit again. There is a background of sweet malt and abbey esters that really support the main flavors. There is a really long aftertaste of damp forrest floor, in the best possible sense. When the glass is empty I feel like I have ingested a rainy summers day in the forrest.

The bilberry beer is surprisingly similar, but deep blue of course and slightly less tart. The rose hip beer was not very successful, something in the rosehips brought out the mintiness in the myrtle in a very unpleasant way. The beer without berries was also good although slightly more like a regular abbey ale.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with how this beer turned out and I am definitely going to experiment more with ingredients that remind me of the great outdoors that I like. I’ll probably use bog myrtle again, and definitely lingonberries. With their bitter tartness they contributed a really nice berry-ness to the beer even at a very low dosage. I think they could go very well as a contrast in styles that are traditionally sweet from caramel malts or alcohol content.

This was the fursthest outside of my comfort zone I have ever gone with a beer and it certainly payed off. Despite me liking this beer a lot, I was still hesitent to give it to my friends as it was a pretty weird one by most people’s standards. Regardless, I feel really encouraged to try to make more beer with herbs and berries and definitely try and use the essence of places I love as inspiration for future batches.