United Nations of Beer

Green Beer recipe

by Jared Birbank
(Home Brew Delegate)

Green Beer recipe

Making Green Beer: How can it be done?

Are you thinking of "green beer" for St. Patrick's Day -- green coloured beer? Or are you considering environmentally friendly beer?

If you want a green coloured beer, read on! I'm happy to help.

If you want an environmentally friendly beer you'll have to wait for the next installment.

Green coloured beer recipe

Green coloured beer can be as easy as adding green food colouring. You could add it to the beer while it is fermenting, or you could add it in each glass you pour. The key is choosing a beer that is suitable.

When trying to make your green beer recipe a nice green colour, you need to pick a pale coloured beer. A stout is not a good choice, as the blackness of the beer will hide any green you add. Equally a red ale or a dark ale isn't going to look too good. A nice light coloured beer is needed, pilseners, lagers, light pale ales or wheat beers.

If you are adding the colouring to the glass, a couple of drops into the glass then pouring the beer on top will work well. Otherwise, adding the colouring to the fermenter will work if you home brew, or if you are kegging, add the color into the keg before carbonating will also be great.

Fruit green beer recipe ideas

As an alternative to food colouring, you could use fruit to make green beer. Using fruit in beer is not unusual. Many brewers add strawberry, raspberries and cherries to their beer to add an extra dimension to their beer. These fruits leave their mark on the beer with fruit flavour, additional alcohol from the sugars in the fruit and finally, and most importantly here, colour.

So to make green beer recipe we need green fruit. While there are a few green fruits out there, not many have the intensity of colour needed to turn anything else green. I'd recommend using kiwi fruit. Given the tartness of the kiwi I think it would work well in a wheat beer.


A simple wheat beer recipe of 50% wheat and 50% barley would be ideal. For extract brewers two cans of wheat extract would be ideal, and for the kit brewers grab a wheat beer kit. As with most wheat beers we want to keep the bitterness down but this is more true with fruit beers. Late hops are also not needed. It is about the fruit.

Getting the fruit into the beer is easy enough. Some people add it to secondary fermentation after racking. The other option is to add it at the start of fermentation.

Peel and chop the kiwi fruit, give it a bit of a mash and add the puree to the beer. It is often recommended not to boil the fruit because it can release pectins that make your beer cloudy. With a wheat beer this isn't a problem, but if you were going with a pilsner that is something to take note of.

We do need to heat the fruit though. Regardless of whether we are adding the fruit at the start of primary fermentation or in secondary, we need to heat the fruit to around 65-80 degrees Celsius and keep it there for about 20 minutes.

Plenty of people have been successful adding fruit to secondary without pasteurising it, but there is an increased risk of infection.

How much fruit to add to your green beer recipe depends on how much colour and flavour you want to come through. Somewhere between one to six pounds would be ideal for a standard 23 litre batch. This should add enough colour and flavour to make an interesting St Patricks Day green beer.

Editor's note: please send in your green beer recipe pics if you give this a try!