Pineapple beer

I mentioned at work that I had made some pineapple beer, and it had gone mouldy, and the consensus opinion on this was “WHAT!?” and “do you drink beer?”  Well, as it happens, the answer to both of these questions is the same: “huh?”  Firstly, pineapple beer is kind of like ginger beer, and secondly, it’s not particularly difficult to make.  Today I looked up the recipe for pineapple beer on the Internet, and found, lo and behold, that I make it all wrong.

According to the Huletts sugar recipe, the pineapple skin should be scrubbed clean. Another recipe said the pineapple should be boiled. All of the recipes I saw say you must use yeast.  And raisins.  And maybe you must crush the pineapple.

So, to rid the world of these misconceptions, here is the simple recipe for pineapple beer: a family “secret”:

Ingredients:

• A pineapple
• A few cups of sugar
• A big plastic mixing bowl

Method:

1. Buy a pineapple. Take it home. Doing this kind of thing in a pineapple shop is seriously anti-social.
2. Peel the pineapple. Throw away the spiky leaves, but keep everything yellow – but don’t throw anything away right yet
3. Eat the inside of the pineapple. If necessary, share it with your family, or use it in a salad. This is really important. If your kids are anything like mine, they will explain that little children don’t drink beer, so now is a good time to let them have some benefit from the pineapple before you monopolise it. It will make them stop complaining, and once there is only peel left, you’ll be ready for the next step.
4. Fill up the mixing bowl to mostly-full with luke-warm water.  Not boiling water.  Really — believe me — you want this water to be a nice gentle temperature.  I get my luke-warm water from the geyser, and add a bit of coldish water. Update: yeast does not like chlorine and detergent – so if you have a mixing bowl that was rinsed properly after being washed, and water that has boiled from which the chlorine has evaporated, that will work best.
5. Throw in the pineapple skins.
6. Cover the pineapple skins with sugar.  That should take about three or four cups of sugar to do.  See what you can do to submerge the pineapple skins in the water.  Don’t try to dissolve the sugar in the water.
7. Cover the bowl with a cloth — something that will let some light in, but not fruit flies or flies.  A baking drying rack and a couple of pegs can help.  The most common way of losing your batch of pineapple beer is that the cloth sags into the water.  Also, don’t do what I did, and cover with another bowl.  Nobody makes light pineapple beer, and covers it with a bowl, because that’s dark enough for mould to grow.  Update: Ants love pineapple beer, and carry mould.  To keep ants out, put your brewing container in a basin of water, or on glasses swimming in bowls of water.  Ants dislike swimming somewhat.
8. Leave it for two to four days at room temperature.  If your room is really cold, maybe look for a warmer room.
9. After 2 days, check that the water is still sweet.  Add another cup or two of sugar.
10. When it starts to look bubbly and disgusting after two to four days, fish out the pineapple skins.  If you are foolish enough to taste them, you will notice that they have lost all of their sweetness.  If it doesn’t bubble, then throw it out, and don’t use that pineapple again.  If you’re feeling adventurous, you can add some yeast, but I don’t know where you’re going to get it.
11. Strain the mixture through a sieve, and put it in the fridge to chill.

And that’s it. So, where’s the yeast? Well, it turns out, that if you’re in a flaming hurry, you can add your own yeast. It also turns out that the yeast was on the pineapple all along, trying to eat it up. It wasn’t doing particularly well at this task until you cut it up, and dunked it in water. If you boil your pineapple, you kill the natural yeast that was eating it, and also your chances of bubbles in your pineapple beer. If you wash your pineapple thoroughly, you’ll probably get rid of that yeast too, and your pineapple beer won’t fly.

What about chopping the bits up?  Well, you can, I suppose, if you want to.  Chances are you did enough chopping when you served the pineapple to the family.  Also, if the yeast is hungry enough, it will disassemble your pineapple skins for you, and chopping is going to make a very small difference to that.

Disclaimer: being made with random yeasts, this pineapple beer may or may not kill you. It hasn’t killed me yet.  Have a good sip, and wait for the headache.  YMMV.

Alternative ending: after 3 days, you find that your pineapple beer has no sugar, so you hastily add some in the hope of rescuing it.  After 5 days, you forget to check it, and after 7 days, you discover it, and to avoid a household incident, you throw it down the sink.

Note:  I picked out the mouldy chunks of pineapple, and drank the rest.  The family seems scared …