Jalapeño Cream Ale Recipe

In this week’s Connect Savannah article, I talked about the growing trend in pepper beers, the brews that add some additional spice thanks to ingredients like jalapeños.

For my own pepper beer experiment, I started with a cream ale base. Cream ales are fairly mild and serve as a great test platform for experimentation. I did this recently with my ‘Creaming for Vengeance ale, which was a cream ale with dry-hopped Willamette and bitter orange peel.

Like my last Cream Ale, I again turned to a Northern Brewer kit to get an easy recipe so my time could be spent worrying about additions and not the base beer. Their Speckled Heifer recipe was a new twist for me, as it details a partial mash process. Instead of using only liquid and dry extracts, a portion of the sugar is derived from mashing and sparging grains.

If you’re an extract brewer looking into partial mash as an intermediary step before going all-grain, be aware that it will add about an hour and a half to your brew day for a five gallon batch. Give yourself some extra time at clean-up as well.

If you’re a do-it-yourself type or want to source ingredients from your local homebrew shop, here is my ingredients list:

Grains

• 2 lbs Rahr 2-row
• 0.5 lbs CaraPils
• 0.25 lbs flaked barley
• 0.25 lbs flaked maize

Extracts

• 3.15 lbs Pilsen malt syrup
• 1 lb Briess Pilsen dry malt extract

Hops

• 1 oz Cluster

Yeast

• Wyeast 1056 American Ale

Heat

• 7 Jalapeños

Brew Day Process

• Split, de-seed and roast four jalapeños by your method of choice. I used a broiler on high heat.
• Heat 5 quarts of water to 164°F in your brewing kettle.
• Pour crushed grains into a nylon mesh bag and place in the kettle.
• Check to ensure the temperature is close to 152°F. If it’s off, add hot or cold water to get it within a degree or two.
• Remove from heat and let the mash rest by putting a lid on the kettle and insulating it in towels for one hour.
• Heat 5 quarts of water to 170°F and maintain the temperature for your sparge.
• Slowly raise the temperature of your mash to 170°F after the hour of rest.
• Lift the mesh bag of grains from the kettle and pour the sparge water slowly through the grains and collect in your kettle.
• Add water to your kettle to get to your usual brewing quantity.
• Bring to a boil.
• Remove from heat and add the liquid and malt extract, then return to boil for 60 minutes total.

Addition Times:
– Add 0.75 oz Cluster hops with 45 minutes remaining.
– Add 0.25 oz Cluster hops with 15 minutes remaining.
– Add four roasted jalapeños with 15 minutes remaining.

• Cool the wort, add to your fermenter and bring your volume to 5 gallons.
• Aerate the wort and add yeast.
• Keep in a dark, quiet area until fermentation completes, within one week.

One week later

• Siphon your beer to a secondary fermenter.
• Roast the remaining 3 jalapeños and add to your secondary fermenter for one week.

Bottle or keg your beer to carbonate and enjoy!