What is the strangest thing you've brewed?

[Brewtrog]

We've all done it at some time or another - find a recipe (or idea) that is so outlandish it has to be done, even if just for the shock factor. I'm interested to see what's the weirdest we can come up with. Bonus points if it turned out well.
I'll start us off with my second and first
2nd place was energy drink wine. It was ok tasting, but had a strange habit of making you cough, so it got poured down the drain
1st place is my cock ale - it's an extract ale that has a chicken carcass submerged in it for the length of fermentation. So far I've only tasted it flat and it tasted rather nice already.
What's your's?

[Zech]

Ooh, nice question! Probably my parsnip and nettle ale. I'm not sure it even qualifies as 'ale', since it doesn't use malt or grain at all. I'd been wondering about alternatives to shop-bought sugars, then had quite a lot of parsnips still in the ground at the time they all started growing again (I know! How did that happen? ). This was an experiment in brewing from only home-grown sugar, i.e. that occurring naturally in the parsnips. I added the nettles because I thought they'd balance the flavour well (and they do), and threw in a few parsnip seeds too, though I'm not sure they add much.

The result is pretty drinkable. I reckon the alcohol content is about 2 - 2.5%, so it's the smallest of small beer. It tastes... wholesome. There are strong vegetable flavours, as you might expect, and it tastes as if it's probably doing you good. Who knows, maybe it is!

[MKG]

Thinking ... ... ...

(There's been a few).

Back soon.

[Green Aura]

I don't know if they count as weird really - but they are to us.
1) thistle root wine. OH weeded a load - yes, definitely a load, of thistles, spent some time looking at what he could do with this pile of prickly weeds and came up this - an American recipe. At the time I queried the amount of sugar but we followed the recipe left it several years (if you search back through here there'll be a reference to it somewhere) and threw it out at the start of this year - absolutely cr4p.
2) my daughter made some cider using the liquor off the top of the sourdough starter, apple juice and the remnants of a pumpkin. Not bad at all - a bit dry but we're going to bottle it with a tot of sugar for fizz and a little less tartness.

[Brewtrog]

we're going to bottle it with a tot of sugar for fizz and a little less tartness.

don't put more than 1tsp sugar per 500ml bottle otherwise you'll end up with potential bottle bombs. If it's too dry and you still want it fizzed then use a sweetener to get rid of dryness, otherwise stabilise it and add sugar for a sweeter but flat cider. Of course you could just add a tsp of sugar to the glass as you pour it.

[Green Aura]

Good thinking, Batman.

[Brewtrog]

don't put more than 1tsp sugar per 500ml bottle

I should have pointed out that this sugar will do nothing for sweetness either - it all gets fermented so that the booze carbonates.

[Marc]

I made some wheat wine once, and tea wine too - they were both absolutely horrible

[MKG]

Right - I've thought about it and it has to be apple wine. I'd made one wine kit before this - a red is about all you could say about that - and decided to do the "real thing". I had no idea what I was doing, but got hold of a recipe and made five gallons of the stuff. The red had been ready after about a month, so I assumed that the apple wine would be, too. It was vile. It stank of sulphur dioxide (well, no one told me that's what Camden tablets were supposed to do) and it was as acidic as all hell. No one told me about maturation either. After one glass (which I didn't finish) the whole lot went down the drain.

[ina]

I don't think I ever made anything really strange - some tasted better than others, though - but the worst homebrew I can remember from a long time ago, when I was in London and my landlady brought out a few bottles of her ex-husbands stuff... Celery wine anybody? I still remember this taste of alcoholic soup! Yuk.

(Maybe that was the reason he was an ex-husband.)

[Zech]

a red is about all you could say about that

That reminds me of my dad's beetroot wine. He used to grow beetroot because they were easy, even though none of us liked them. One day he dug them up, brought them all indoors and declared that we were going to make wine from them. They were huge! It took a lot of sawing with the bread knife to get them into sensible sized pieces. I seem to remember he brought the spring balance down from his workshop to weigh them with. I think we may have got pounds and kilos mixed up at some point...

Beautiful colour, though.

[Brewtrog]

I've actually done both tea wine (currently doing my second batch) and celery wine (soon to open a year old bottle) both of which I enjoyed.

[WhiteWolf]

Few years ago I brewed up a batch of Tea wine - think it was Earl Grey (was quite a while ago) and a batch of Coffee wine (Nescafe to be precise). Both went down rather nicely, the tea had a very delicate flavour.

WW

[doofaloofa]

Sweed wine

nasty, but drinkable after 15 years