BeerBorg

so the wife made a mess of boiled cabbage. after straining out the cabbage I was looking at the steaming pot of cabbage water and wondered...

what would happen if you used this to mash your all grain batch of beer? could you? would you want to?

it was such a nice purple too!

You'd make cloudy purpleish beer (or some light funky color if it was a PM). Or gray beer. Sometimes the color breaks down after a long time boiling. For purple beer I'd suggest some pasteurized purple carrot juice after flameout.

If it was a partial volume PM you might not notice much difference in flavor, but if it was a full volume BIAB mash in a big pot of juice (that's a lot of boiled cabbage!) you probably would get some. Some of the sulfury stuff will get taken up by the yeast during fermentation, so may not be as strong as you would think. At least probably not, but some vegetal sweet flavor might stick around. Whatever flavor was left would probably work best in a cream ale.

So... purple cream ale?

we had about 2 gallons of cabbage water. now some ppl actually drink it and it is healthy for you. I'm not keen on just drinking it straight so I wondered about mashing with it. I figure 2 gallons mash water would make a nice beer... and I could sparge with regular water so the total volume of cabbage water would be small.
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the vitamins in it would make the beer healthy right? a perfect excuse to drink lots of it.. doing it for my health! I did wonder about the sulfur compounds.. good to know yeast would clean up a chunk of it.
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a 5 gallon batch of cream ale all grain would only set me back about 20 bucks not counting water and gas... hmmmm.... i could scale it down to 2.5 gallons in case it comes out weird....
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by the beer gods i think i'll try it next cabbage day!

thanks mashani...

only problem i can see with this: wife uses baking soda in the water. 1 tsp alone will jack the ph of the mash to almost 7ph. i would have to add lactic acid or acidulated malt to knock it down. or she has to boil it without it... which can make the cabbage tough.

If your mashing, adding some acidulated malt is easy enough.

If I had 2 gallons of purple water on brew day, I might go for it too. If you do it, I hope it works out well and you have got to post pics.

The extra sodium added will change the flavor profile a bit, but it should still be ok at that level I think.

EDIT: You could go nuts with the acidulated malt and add more salt and make purple Goze? Or toss in some sour bugs. Or do a sour mash. If you do that you don't need to boil it for more then a few minutes. Just get it really freaking sour so you don't need much hops.

i have a real crappy digital cam... but... if I do this I will come here and post pics and review. cream ales are usually quick beers and don't require tons of aging so..
note to self: remind wife next cabbage day to use mineral water and not tap. hell If she makes a big enough batch I can use the cabbage water for sparging too. the Scottish blood I do have in my veins just whooped at the prospect of saving a few pennies more.

Cruachan!

never made goze or sours... cant see myself enjoying those but then again I used to swear I would never enjoy wheat beers. lol...