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I'm thinking of starting a lemon tea beer, and am wondering if you guys have any input. This is the tentative plan for an extract recipe:

1. add black tea to barley steep

2. remove tea with barley and follow normal procedures

3. at prime time add a can of condensed lemonaide (defrosted obviously) and stir in instead of priming sugar


Have any of you ever done this before? Should I be worrying about the preservatives/sulfites in the lemonaide affecting the brew/yeast? Would I be better off using lemon extract or juice, and if so, when? Will the acid from the tea do bad things?

adamshell wrote:Will the acid from the tea do bad things?

I'm not sure about the rest, but I think that the tea may behave the same as hot steeped coffee i.e. the acid will kill the head retention in your beer. I wonder if cold steeped tea added to secondary might be a better approach.

Keep in mind I'm completely talking out my ass here as I haven't done any research.

I don't know how pH plays into an extract/partial mash, but for an all-grain batch you want the pH ~5.3 (so the enzymes can do their thing, IIRC). I don't know how much the tea would alter the pH, but I guess the easiest way is to measure it and find out. Adding a bit of chalk (say maybe 0.25 tsp) would buffer against too much of a pH shift.

I know there are more than a couple lemon tea beers comercially available, but

If the lemonade is frozen then there are likely no preservatives.