Having grown the hottest peppers in the world I was looking forward to adding some flavour and heat to my beer. The small pepper is the Trinidad Scorpion (1.5M scovilles) and the other is the Ghost pepper (Bhut Jolokia, 1M scovilles). To put this in perspective a Habonero is about 0.3M scovilles and a Jalapeño only has 8k scovilles.
Not wanting to ruin 5 gallons of beer I waded into the heat with first pouring the beer over a whole pepper and then swirled the pepper in the beer. This brought out a distinct pepper flavour more on the back of my mouth. No heat detected. We wanting to get some heat so we cut them open and repeated the swirl test for about 10 seconds and then finally with 20 seconds. Each time the heat started to come through. The 10 second swirl gave us what we described as a warm fuzzy heat. The beer flavour was all there but they the heat of the pepper cam though through. Very pleasant. The 20 second swirl brought he heat of the beer to what I would describe as a very hot curry. Still not rushing for yogurt but this was more like a prickly heat.
I did this experiment with a hoppy IPA and a Maple Oak Stout. I would recommend doing this with a beer with a lot of malt flavour. The heat and the malts go together well.
Next time I plan to push the envelop and dry hop a few liters with these peppers. There are a lot of complex flavours happening which are going to be a challenge to extract without setting the beer on fire.
