Made it: Banana Beer chapter 1
My first batch of banana beer was pretty simple. I put about a half-gallon of frozen bananas into a half-gallon size slow-cooker, blended it up with just enough water to make it move, then added amylase from an old bottle I had lying around and tried to hold it between 145 and 155 F for about 10 hours.
At first, I'd adjusted the pH to about 7.2 with baking soda, having seen a pH for human amylase. But then I saw a better chart that showed the type of amylase I was using, which wants a pH around 5, so I brought it back down with citric acid. Annoyingly, it had started out around pH 6, which would have been fine. Oh well.
After that ~10 hour "mash," I stuck it in the fridge overnight. Then I diluted it to about 1 total gallon and boiled it for about 40 minutes, adding hops in two portions similar to the IPA recipe I'd made recently. [add details if I find them]. After cooling that with a wort-chiller, I pitched some yeast I'd harvested from some cider and put it all in a 1 gal glass jug.
It was still waaay to thick to get an kind of gravity reading so I shrugged and moved on with my life.
After a lag in of about a day, it started bubbling! It bubbled in a very satisfying way for about a week, sitting on my desk whispering fun things to me as I worked. Then I took a nut milk bag, sprayed the hell out of it and myself with Star-San, and filtered out most of the sediment. That I put back in the washed and re-sanitized 1 gal jug.
Concerned about oxidation, I decided to give it some simple sugar to eat. My hope was to degas the beer and purge the headspace of oxygen more than it was to increase the ABV. I dissolved 2 tbsp of table sugar in 1/3 cup of boiling water, cooled it in the freezer, and then added it to the jar. It bubbled again for about 4 days and then slowed to a stop.
After that filtration, there was still some sediment, which settled to the bottom, giving me a cloudy yellow liquid. I let it sit in the secondary fermentation for another week [extend from here after what I do on 5/30]
It's good! Bright yellow, which is fun. The taste is mild, it doesn't smack of bananas. It tastes mostly like hopped hard apple ciders I've done, but with a wide middle on the palate instead of a sharp top. Even my dad liked it okay. You wouldn't guess it was made from bananas if I didn't tell you, which is both cool and a flaw. After all, it's a lot more work than hard apple cider :)