“Dry Hopping” is a technique used by many brewers, especially when making heavily-hopped brews such as an IPA. In short, dry hops are added to the brew after fermentation, the brew sits quietly for a while as the hops impart their flavor to the brew. Normally, hops are boiled with the beer to extract their flavor, and removed from the wort (unfermented beer) right after boiling.
Experimentation with adding dried cannabis flowers to the beer after brewing, in the manner usually used for dry-hopping, is the way to develop the best-tasting CANNABEER. I would think that several weeks to a month in beer of 5% alcohol would extract all of the flavors… plus most all of the cannabinoids, terpenes, and terpenoids from the bud.
Several hundred years ago, hops were only one of the herbs used to flavor beer. Brewers would try anything that grew locally, and I am certain that hemp was tried often, although I have seen no record of it in the brewing literature. It seems that hops were the preferred additive, and are traditionally used in most all beer today.
(The most off-the-wall ancient beer recipe I have seen is for “Cock Ale”. It is a strong brew that is enhanced by a whole rooster, macerated into a paste with a mortar and pestle and added to the brew before fermentation. Yikes!)
Now that we have strain-specific cannabis with well-defined tastes and aromas, a pioneering CANNABEER Brewer could tinker with the amounts and strains of various cannabis flowers, and come up with the formula for great-tasting CANNABEER.
I would suggest that the best tasting CANNABEER will likely be developed by brewing initially with no hops, and adding the cannabis flowers, in a mesh bag, to the wort after fermentation, and then letting the beer sit quietly for at least two weeks.
It may take a bunch of experimentation before the perfect blend of cannabis
taste and potency is achieved, but the rewards should be well worth the effort. Beer flavored with Afghani will certainly taste very different from beer made with Blue Dream or OG Kush … but, once the perfect balance is worked out, the results might be spectacular.
I’d certainly appreciate any feedback on your brewing adventures.
Dave