Dandelion coffee and beer

We've made two, very different, drinks from dandelion. The first, made a few months ago is dandelion "coffee". This was pretty simple, wash and roast dandelion roots before grinding to a coffee-like consistency. The second is dandelion beer, more ingredients but really simple as well.

Preparing raw root and grinding after roasting

 Based on a couple of different recipes we read online, we decided to make one with roasted dandelion root and fresh dandelion greens.

To make a gallon of beer we boiled together:

• 10g roasted roots (cut into small chunks)
• 100g dandelion greens (picked mainly off plants that hadn't flowered yet*)
• 15g of ginger (grated)
• A mug of dandelion coffee (made with 3tsp of "coffee")

Before adding it to:

• 25g treacle
• 25g honey
• 400g caster sugar
• Juice of half a lemon
• 30g cream of tartar
• Wine yeast (all we have apart from bread yeast)

Our current brews all together

After leaving this in the demijohn for about a week, we bottled it up. After another week or so in the bottles (burping every day) we started to drink it and it's been a definite success. It's sweet and citrusy, refreshing and quite cider-like. It could maybe do with a bit more bitterness to make it more beery and a little less sweetness. Recipes online that we referenced used larger quantities of the bittering dandelion greens so maybe we'll try that for the second batch, as well as slightly reducing the sugar.

The final product

* apparently leaves from plants that have flowered are much more bitter and have stronger diuretic properties.