Brewing with Fonio, Subbing DME for LME, & Dip Hopping
Q. I’ve been hearing a bit about fonio, but have no idea what it is or how it’s used in brewing. Can you shed some light on this topic?
Robert Smith
Lodi, California
A. Fonio caught the attention of Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery in 2019 by way of a TED Talk, “A Forgotten Ancient Grain that Could Help Africa Prosper,” presented in 2017 by Senegalese chef and passionate fonio advocate Pierre Thiam.
In a 2024 interview with Chef Thiam about listening to his TED Talk, Garret said, “I knew from day one that people at some point had made beer out of this because people had made beer in Africa out of every grain that there was. And the first time we [brewed with] it, we did it with about 30 or 40% [white] fonio, the beer actually smelled like Gewürztraminer wine. Kind of like lychee fruit and all these very tropical fruit sort of characteristics. It smelled like wine. And then it had this very subtle, almost . . . unbuttered popcorn finish in the end, that [added a] kind of warmth.”
Garrett is as passionate about brewing with fonio as Chef Thiam is about cooking with this ancient grain (more on that in a bit). In celebration of his 30-year anniversary with Brooklyn Brewing, the brewery launched “Brewing for Impact, an initiative that celebrates his enduring influence while embarking on a collaborative exploration with seven breweries worldwide to spotlight the ancient West African grain fonio — and its untapped brewing potential.”
The breweries who have participated in this collaborative initiative are Maison Kalao (Dakar, Senegal), Thornbridge Brewery (Bakewell, Derbyshire, United Kingdom), Omnipollo (Stockholm, Sweden), Carlsberg (Copenhagen, Denmark), Russian River Brewery (Santa Rosa, California), Brooklyn Brewery (Brooklyn, New York), Jing-A Brewing Co. (Beijing, China), and Guinness (Ireland and U.S.A.).
This background explains why fonio is popping up in the press, but what exactly is fonio and why are people so excited about it?
White fonio (Digitaria exilis) is a part of the Paniceae tribe of grasses that include millet. Although there are other types of fonio, like black fonio, white fonio is by far the most agriculturally significant. When reading about “fonio,” it is safe to assume you are reading about white fonio. Historical and archaeological records show that fonio has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years, making it one of the oldest, if not the oldest, African cereal crops. Today, fonio is primarily grown in the hot, dry, Sahel region located south of the Sahara Desert and stretching east from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Guinea, Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Senegal are the largest fonio producers. Although fonio is a small crop when compared to crops like rice and wheat, annual production is about 750,000 metric tons, or about 2,000 times the annual production volume of Kernza®, another small grain that has recently drawn media attention.
Two things make fonio a special cereal: Its nutritive properties and its growth habits. Fonio, like quinoa, soy, amaranth, buckwheat, and chia, contains all nine essential amino acids, making it a complete source of protein. And fonio produces its bounty in dry climates with poor soils, and without irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Chef Thiam’s passion about fonio began after he learned about this forgotten grain and how fonio cultivation could help feed his brothers and sisters in Senegal.
His interest led to dramatic improvements in processing, a traditionally labor-intensive and slow process, a complete supply chain giving African farmers access to the U.S. market, and a sustainable way to bring money back to Africa to further grow agriculture in a region with very real needs. That’s the inspirational food story. The beer story picks up when Garrett Oliver listened to Chef Thiam’s TED Talk in 2019. Being the creative and awesome brewer that he is, Garrett’s first thought was beer! And the rest is history.
Thanks to Chef Thiam’s vision, fonio imported into the U.S. has been milled to remove the husk and steamed to gelatinize its starch, making fonio an easy addition to the mash. And because fonio starch, typically comprised of 77% amylopectin and 23% amylose, is very similar to other cereal starches used in brewing, it easily converts like other unmalted adjuncts during the mash. Unlike oats and rye, both known as rich sources of gummy beta-glucans and pentosans, aka dietary fiber, fonio is not a gummy source of stuck mash headaches. Finally, fonio usually contains less than 10% protein by weight, giving it about the same potential extract as rice, maize, and other starchy adjuncts.
What about milling? No need to mill because fonio is smaller than the grains of sand found on many beaches. If you want to crush fonio to maximize yield, the way to do that is to use a powerful blender and turn it into fonio flour. But the commercial brewers using fonio are not doing that.
Like all non-traditional brewing ingredients, there are no style rules about brewing with fonio. Have fun, be creative, and let the flavor come through. After cooking with fonio for the first time, two styles immediately came to mind; a dunkel formulated on the lighter end of the color spectrum and a rustic farmhouse ale using a restrained yeast strain. If you want to give fonio a try, the easiest place to find it is online.
Q. For convenience, my brews are 3-gallon (11.5-L) DME (dried malt extract) batches. When I select a recipe that calls for LME (liquid malt extract), I convert it to DME for the ease of measuring the correct quantity and storing the excess for future use. Are there any negative effects of substituting DME for LME?
Chris Patterson
Downers Grove, Illinois
A. Both DME and LME are great options for homebrewers looking to brew without the hassle of mashing. In general, DME has a longer shelf life than LME because of its lower water content; about 5% compared to about 25%. When LME ages, especially when stored at room or elevated temperatures, a range of unpleasant compounds develop that include molasses-, licorice-, and cardboard-like flavors. Collectively, these off-flavors impart a distinctive “twang” to LME. Before homebrewers generally understood the relationship between aged LME and beer flavor, homebrewed beers were often characterized by this strange “homebrew twang” that is absent in commercially brewed beers, except for the rarest of the rare examples brewed using old LME; uncommon in commercial beers because few use LME and those that do tend to use it shortly after purchasing.
The short answer to your question is no; subbing DME for LME does not have any negative effects to your finished beer. And doing so for the reason you stated makes perfect sense. Indeed, one way to improve the flavor of beer brewed from extracts is by using DME instead of LME. It’s important to note that LME, in and of itself, does not cause off-flavors; it’s just a problem when it is old and twangy.
It’s also important to account for the differences in moisture when subbing DME for LME. For example, 1 pound/kilo of DME at 5% moisture is equal to 1.27 pounds/kilos LME at 25% moisture (calculated by dividing 95% solids by 75% solids). The challenge with this conversion is we do not always know the moisture content of the ingredients we are using at home. The good news is that most raw material suppliers producing products intended for the homebrewing market make their product specification sheets relatively easy to find, and moisture content is one piece of information found on specification sheets for DME and LME.
Q. Your video about dip hopping (available at www.byo.com/video/dip-hopping) is intriguing and has piqued my interest. When making the slurry, what ratio of water-to-hops is recommended? This seems like an important detail. And the other curious thing to me is the information on 2M3MB. What are the parameters on the chart? the comparison and reduction of 2M3MB clearly shows on the chart but what is the actual difference, quantitatively? Is it significant?
Warren Wilson
Via email
Q. After reading the “Techniques” column “Dip Hopping: Maximize the Best Hop Aromas” by Drew Beechum and Denny Conn in the November-December 2024 issue and doing a bit of research, it looks like I should be boiling the wort for a short time before transferring the dip hop portion out. Why would this need to be done as opposed to just transferring and reserving it directly from the kettle before it even reaches a boil?
Chris Campbell
Bordentown, New Jersey
A. It’s not often that we receive two questions related to the same topic at roughly the same time. Seems that the stars are aligned, and inquisitive brewers are again interested in our recent discussions about dip hopping. So, I am lumping my answer to these two questions together.
For those readers new to this topic, dip hopping was developed by Kirin Brewing in 2012 and reportedly reduces the concentration of unpleasant aromas associated with 2-mercapto 3-methyl butanol (2M3MB), an onion-like aroma that develops during fermentation, and myrcene from dry hopping, while simultaneously preserving linalool and other pleasant hoppy aromas from dry hopping.
The dip hop method originally described by Kirin uses an agitated tank to mix hop pellets with water, followed by the injection of this slurry into the cool wort stream as wort is cooled en route to the fermenter.1
OK, so the first question related to dip hopping comes to us from Warren Wilson who saw this topic discussed on the BYO+ video series. Warren, unfortunately I am not able to find any specifics about the slurry concentration used to hydrate the hop pellets. Based on Kirin’s data showing the change in wort gravity in three different trials (no dip hops, dip hops prepared in ambient water, and dip hops prepared in 203 °F/95 °C water), it appears that the water used for hop hydration was essentially part of the wort recipe because all trials began at the same wort gravity.
Dip hopping is believed to work its “magic” by adding nucleation sites to wort prior to fermentation. These nucleation sites reduce dissolved carbon dioxide in fermenting beer, increase peak cell density by easing growth inhibition related to dissolved carbon dioxide, shorten fermentation time, and reduce the concentrations of 2M3MB and myrcene (dip hop versus dry hop). In my opinion, slurry concentration is not critical. In fact, some American craft brewers have used a variant of dip hopping where hop pellets are simply added to an empty fermenter prior to filling with wort. Because many commercial breweries do not have an easy way of adding hop pellets to fermentation tanks, it’s likely that Kirin adapted their dip hopping method to existing equipment in the brewery.
Your next question, Warren, is a very good catch. The data related to 2M3MB concentration during fermentation shown on the poster presented by Tsuchiya, Ota, Yoshimoto, Kobayashi and Inadome at the 2018 Brewers Summit is missing the scale on the y-axis.1 They do show that the units for 2M3MB concentration are µg/L, which sheds a bit of useful light. The aroma threshold for 2M3MB is reportedly 0.17 µg/L. It appears that the 2M3MB concentration is 0 µg/L before fermentation and rises to 4 “ticks” in the dip hopped trial and 8 “ticks” after 7 days of fermentation. Making assumptions about the scale is frustrating. However, if one “tick” is greater than 0.1 µg/L, the concentration of 2M3MB in both the dip hopped and control trials were above threshold at the end of fermentation. It is also clear that the concentration of 2M3MB in the dip hopped trial was about half that of the control. This difference in concentration explains why the dip hopped beers are described as having a more desirable aroma.
The Kirin study also measured the concentration of H2S (hydrogen sulfide), or rotten egg aroma, in the control and dip hop trials, where the dip hop trial contained about 9 ppb of H2S versus 14 ppb of H2S in the control. The aroma threshold of H2S in beer is about 10 ppb.
On to the second question from Chris Campbell, relating to a variation on dip hopping described by Drew Beechum and Denny Conn in their recent column. In their article, they call for removing a portion of wort after the boil begins for use in their spin on dip hopping. After the wort is removed, the remainder of the wort is boiled as usual and the wort with the dip hops is later reunited in the fermenter. Boiling the wort before use is just good brewing practice to kill off bacteria that are almost always present in wort — an exception to this rule is in very long mashes used to produce historical, no-boil beers where the long and hot mash effectively pasteurizes the mash.
I’m a big fan of dip hopping for two main reasons. The first is that it offers some improvements to beer aroma without having to invest in new equipment, a new hop product, or find an obscure hop variety. The second reason is that the data supporting how the method works are clear and pass the sniff test. Not to throw shade on other brewing methods, but there are several that don’t hold up well under scrutiny. Three cheers to dip hopping. Dip, hop, hooray! Dip, hop, hooray! Dip, hop, hooray!
