And when life gives you beetroots.....

I saw these at the markets for $3 and they looked so good that I couldn't say no

We have a cookbook of old Australian recipes called 'Possum Pie, Beetroot Beer & Lamingtons', so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give one of the title recipes a shot.

This isn't your usual ingredients list - anyone with German sensitivities for beer should look away now -

• 1kg sugar (the book suggested 3/4 lb or around 400g, but see below) 
• 30g hops
• 1 beetroot
• 1 tablespoon grated ginger 

The recipe is pretty simple -

• Bring water to boil and add in hops and some grated ginger. I misread and added the sugar at this point as well, but that should have come later.
• Boil for 20 mins and then add the beetroot and the sugar (if you haven't done so already).
• Boil for another 30 minutes or so and then allow to cool.

At first I though the colour wasn't coming out of the beetroot

But after it had cooled it was looking much 'beetter' (*arf*)

The actual recipe suggests that you bottle at this point with 'barm' (I think that's yeast cake left over from making bread) and then it's ready to serve 5 days later. This wouldn't give much chance for alcohol production and you'd end up with a bitter fizzy 'soft drink'.

I decided to take it to the next level so once the wort was cooled & strained I added it to a fermentor. Then i pitched some S-04 ale yeast and let 'godisgoode' work its magic. The next day everything was bubbling nicely and the colour was developing beautifully. Once the initial fermentation dies down I'll top it up and leave for a couple of weeks.

Boiling 30g of hops for almost an hour gives a intensely hoppy brew - in fact by adding the hops to the wort and then bringing it to boil you're actually 'first wort hopping', which is an old way of ensuring maximum bitterness in the body of the brew. So far from being a novelty drink, I think this will turn out more like a beetroot IPA and I'm already planning a full size batch :)

All I have to do now is catch a possum for the next recipe...