The Making of Prickly Pear Honey Wheat Ale
As the winter fades and spring draws near, the time to brew
one of our favorite seasonal beers is upon us. Prickly Pear Honey Wheat Ale is
back! This seasonal is an American style Wheat Ale that is dry-hopped with
Loral hops and infused with the fruit of a prickly pear cactus.
I developed this recipe while I was running our Chandler brewery,
in collaboration with my assistant brewer at the time, Dannon. We created this
beer to pay homage to our late friend, Ian, a beloved Icon in the brewing
community. Ian’s positive, cheery personality was infectious. When he passed at
just 26 years of age, it impacted everyone that knew him.
Dannon and I wanted to brew something that would be
impactful and would leave anyone who tasted it with a smile, just as Ian did.
We started with one of Ian’s old prickly pear Hefeweizen homebrew recipes as
the base. I remember harvesting the prickly pear fruit from his front yard and
processing it for a brew the next day. We had to remove all of the spines from
the fruit and then boil it down to remove its bitterness. Then we froze it and
made it into a puree for a secondary fermentation addition.
Our rendition has changed dramatically since the days of our
homebrew recipe. At the time, a dry-hopped Wheat beer was rare, let alone one
with fruit in it. The Loral hops had just been released. After trying them, all
I could think about was how it tasted like a prickly pear lemonade from the
farmers’ market. With that in mind, we used the Loral hops to help accentuate
some floral and fruity characters from our beer. We purchased local orange
blossom honey and zested two crates of lemons by hand to add a touch of citrus.
Together, these ingredients culminated into a pretty tasty beverage!
To test our practices and the recipe, we bottled the first batch
and shipped it to the North American Beer Awards (NABA), where it competed in
the experimental beer category. It won a silver medal! From there, it went on
to be an innovation beer in our AZ market, and then again in the Ohio Valley, where
it was met with high praise from our guests.
Now it has made its way to the mainstage again as our newest
seasonal! We are very proud to bring you our Prickly Pear Honey Wheat Ale.
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