http://www.saveur.com/article/Wine-and-Drink/Mexican-Style-Fermented-Pineapple-Drink

It’s a sort of spiced pineapple/piloncillo cider. Ferments quickly and is served over ice. I’ve brewed it up a couple of times and it’s a crowd-pleaser.

Recipe below was scaled from 10 gallons, so I’m omitting actual grain/hop weight to allow you to account for efficiency.

Mash:
50% Wheat
25% Pilsner Malt
25% Acid Malt

Mash the above at ~153 degrees. I personally mash this beer with only about a quarter of the acid malt for about 45 minutes, then add the rest of the acid malt (along with boiling water to maintain the temp) for another 45 minutes, b/c I am concerned about all the acid messing up the conversion. But a buddy brewed the same recipe and threw it all in at once and it wasn’t a problem.

Target OG: 1.045

Boil:
90 minute boil
@ 60 minutes, add enough Saaz hops to get somewhere between 7-10 IBU
@ 60 minutes, add sea salt (0.75 oz per 5 gallons recipe)
@ 5 minutes, add corander (1/4 oz or so per 5 gallons recipe)

Yeast:
I use 2 pkgs SafAle S-05 and one vial WLP300 for 10 gallons. For 5 gallons, I’d just drop that to a single pack. Ferment 1-2 weeks at 62 deg F. The combination of the two yeasts gives you *mostly* a neutral ferment, but you pick up some of the clove from the WLP300 and it fits very nicely in this beer without turning it into a “hefeweizen” style.

And 19th century documents show that German brewing traditions were every bit as diverse as Belgian traditional brewing at the time. A vast diversity of interesting beer was lost because of it. Leipzig gose (spiced with coriander and salt) is one of the very few interesting styles that managed to get a reprieve and survive it.

I would think the high fat content in coconut makes it off-limits for brewing. But I do see some recipes out there. I may give it a try soon.

@3

It’s not just no-preservatives. It’s also vitamin fortified.

@6 and others

The Reinheitsgebot is why so much German beer is technically perfect though ultimately rather boring. Not following it is why Belgian beer is weird but awesome. The law is in any case totally impossible for homebrewers to follow, as Matt @11 correctly notes.

It’s a mystery to me why people give so much respect to this oudated bit of mercantilism. If we dug up a French bread purity law from the 17th century and it forbade butter, I doubt we would give it any reverence at all.

But lets ignore yeast and look at that list again: Barley, water, and hops. What else is missing? Oh right, wheat. Germans drink hefeweizens like they drink water, yet wheat and rye are banned from the 1516 law. Actually, the entire point of the 1516 law was to ban wheat from beer (officially so that bakers didn’t have to compete with brewers for wheat, unofficially because it made the barley that the nobles grew more valuable). So technically, if you want to complain about this particular recipe from the standpoint of the Reinheitsgherhejkhkhhrehlkhre, you should mention that before the pineapple juice.

Salting your water is also technically banned, as chalk/gypsum/etc is not allowed. So if you have shitty water you are SOL for making beer to begin with.

Here’s a recipe I came up with. It turned out quite nicely, and is a hit with everyone I’ve given a sample to:
5 gallons water
4.5lbs US Pale
4.5lbs UK Pale
.5lbs Special B
.25lbs Torrefied Wheat
1lb Dark Candi Sugar (80 SRM)
.75lbs Turbinado
.75oz Willamette (4.5%) 60min
.75oz Willamette (4.5%) 30min
1214 yeast
Mash at 151
85% Efficiency assumed, OG 1.072, FG 1.009
Ferment at 75

I’m familiar with some of these. I recall in particular having sampled an Erdbeerenpils (strawberry pilsner) from one of the more obscure breweries around Frankfurt that I once visited. I can easily see why these are popular, but, well… they just ain’t real beer in my book.

You’re right too about the Rheinheitsgebot’s history. It’s a good illustration of how someone’s standard can, under all the wrong conditions, morph into an oppressive law.

I would guess 90% of what I brew is Reinheitsgebot-compliant, so I’m sympathetic to your personal taste, but there are exceptions to every rule–including the “no fruit in beer” rule.

This is why the Germans came up with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot&quot;Reinheitsgebot, although I see that more as a standard to aspire to than a law.