Tomato beer

 This weekend I decided I'd pick up a long standing challenge - make a tomato & basil beer. I'd carried out a few internet searches and there aren't many recipes out there for beer brewed primarily from tomatoes so I was on my own with this one. Although surprisingly tomato juiced mixed with beer seems to be a reasonably common drink in the US (it's known as 'red beer') - crazy people.

There were a couple of different ways of going about it. I could have just added some extras to tomato juice and fermented that out, similar to how I made my cider. That seemed a bit too easy and I wanted to use vine-grown tomatoes and include the vines in an attempt to give a more resinous texture. I could have followed the technique commonly used by 'hedgerow wine' makers where the ingredients are chopped, mixed with water & yeast and left for an initial ferment for a week or two. Then the solids are separated out and the liquid added to a demijohn. But this normally requires various additional powders to prevent the food from spoiling. So I decided I'd follow the 'traditional' brewing approach and make a 'mash' of tomato.

So here's the base ingredients -

1.8kg Vine tomatoes
1 bunch basil (I only used the leaves plus one stalk) - this may have been too much
1 fennel heart (approx. 200g)
4 bay leaves
2 chillis - I maybe should have removed the seeds, but it's hard to gauge the heat
2 teaspoons ground fennel seeds
3 star anise

Chop everything up (including tomato vines) and cook at medium heat (stirring regularly) to break down the tomatoes. This is early on in the cooking process

and this is 'the mash' after a couple of hours. I'd also added around 1/2 pint of water to keep everything liquid

Press the mix through a steel sieve to get a rich tomato sauce - at this point you can still bail and pretend you're just cooking Italian

Dissolve 1kg of light malt extract into boiling water in another saucepan, then mix the two together and bring to a gentle boil. I'm not sure if this was wise as I lost the vibrancy of the tomato colouring, I think next time I might just use raw sugar instead. I also debated adding in some hops at this point to give a hop aroma, but after tasting I decided against it.

Cool the wort in the usual way and once it's no hotter than body temperature decant into two clean demijohns, then top up with filtered water to halfway. You need to cool the wort to stop the glass demijohns from shattering.  

Add yeast and leave. My two got pretty feisty over-night, and you can see from the foam ('kreuzen') that's being generated why you don't fill the demijohns to the top - if you do it' just gets messy.

Once the kreuzen has died down then I'll top up the demijohns, and then all I can do is wait. I reckon two to three weeks of fermentation should be all it needs followed by a couple of weeks of bottle maturation. Then we need to make some pizza and give it a try!