Ed. Note: There's been a lot of buzz online recently about the recipe for the White House Honey Ale and White House Honey Porter, including a popular petition on We the People, the White House's online petition platform. 
 
 With public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it. 
 
 Inspired by home brewers from across the country, last year President Obama bought a home brewing kit for the kitchen. After the few first drafts we landed on some great recipes that came from a local brew shop. We received some tips from a couple of home brewers who work in the White House who helped us amend it and make it our own. To be honest, we were surprised that the beer turned out so well since none of us had brewed beer before. 
 
 As far as we know the White House Honey Brown Ale is the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds. George Washington brewed beer and distilled whiskey at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson made wine but there's no evidence that any beer has been brewed in the White House. (Although we do know there was some drinking during prohibition…) 
 
 Since our first batch of White House Honey Brown Ale, we've added the Honey Porter and have gone even further to add a Honey Blonde this past summer. Like many home brewers who add secret ingredients to make their beer unique, all of our brews have honey that we tapped from the first ever bee-hive on the South Lawn. The honey gives the beer a rich aroma and a nice finish but it doesn't sweeten it. 
 
 If you want a behind the scenes look at our home-brewing process, this video offers some proof. 
 
 So without any further ado, America – this one's for you: 
 
 Download a printable PDF of both recipes. 
 
 White House Honey Porter 
 
 Ingredients 
 
 2 (3.3 lb) cans light unhopped malt extract 
 
 3/4 lb Munich Malt (cracked) 
 
 1 lb crystal 20 malt (cracked) 
 
 6 oz black malt (cracked) 
 
 3 oz chocolate malt (cracked) 
 
 1 lb White House Honey 
 
 10 HBUs bittering hops 
 
 1/2 oz Hallertaur Aroma hops 
 
 1 pkg Nottingham dry yeast 
 
 3/4 cup corn sugar for bottling 
 
 Directions 
 
 In a 6 qt pot, add grains to 2.25 qts of 168˚ water. Mix well to bring temp down to 155˚. Steep on stovetop at 155˚ for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, bring 2 gallons of water to 165˚ in a 12 qt pot. Place strainer over, then pour and spoon all the grains and liquid in. Rinse with 2 gallons of 165˚ water. Let liquid drain through. Discard the grains and bring the liquid to a boil. Set aside. Add the 2 cans of malt extract and honey into the pot. Stir well. Boil for an hour. Add half of the bittering hops at the 15 minute mark, the other half at 30 minute mark, then the aroma hops at the 60 minute mark. Set aside and let stand for 15 minutes. Place 2 gallons of chilled water into the primary fermenter and add the hot wort into it. Top with more water to total 5 gallons if necessary. Place into an ice bath to cool down to 70-80˚. Activate dry yeast in 1 cup of sterilized water at 75-90˚ for fifteen minutes. Pitch yeast into the fermenter. Fill airlock halfway with water. Ferment at room temp (64-68˚) for 3-4 days. Siphon over to a secondary glass fermenter for another 4-7 days. To bottle, make a priming syrup on the stove with 1 cup sterile water and 3/4 cup priming sugar, bring to a boil for five minutes. Pour the mixture into an empty bottling bucket. Siphon the beer from the fermenter over it. Distribute priming sugar evenly. Siphon into bottles and cap. Let sit for 1-2 weeks at 75˚. 
 
 White House Honey Ale 
 
 Ingredients 
 
 2 (3.3 lb) cans light malt extract 
 
 1 lb light dried malt extract 
 
 12 oz crushed amber crystal malt 
 
 8 oz Biscuit Malt 
 
 1 lb White House Honey 
 
 1 1/2 oz Kent Goldings Hop Pellets 
 
 1 1/2 oz Fuggles Hop pellets 
 
 2 tsp gypsum 
 
 1 pkg Windsor dry ale yeast 
 
 3/4 cup corn sugar for priming 
 
 Directions ||||| White House Honey Brown Ale, believed to be the first beer brewed on the White House grounds, includes light malt extract, amber crystal malt, honey, gypsum, yeast and corn sugar. 
 
 The recipe was released Saturday while President Barack Obama was campaigning in Iowa. 
 
 Obama has been talking about the White House brew for weeks, but he and other officials had refused to disclose details of how it’s made, despite an online petition and repeated questions from reporters. Obama even took a question on the beer recipe during a chat with the website Reddit. 
 
 Obama and his team frequently talk about the president’s fondness for beer, and Obama has been photographed many times downing a beer, including an appearance at the Iowa State Fair last month. 
 
 Being identified as a beer drinker is an easy way for Obama to connect with voters and serves as a not-so-subtle reminder that his Republican rival Mitt Romney, a Mormon, doesn’t drink. 
 
 Obama even held a “beer summit” after a white police sergeant arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates as he tried to get into his own home. 
 
 White House press secretary Jay Carney announced the beer recipe on Twitter, linking to a blog post entitled “Ale to the Chief” that included a video on the brewing process. The White House was careful to say the president paid for the materials used in the beer-making himself. 
 
 “With public excitement about White House beer fermenting such a buzz, we decided we better hop right to it” and release the recipe, wrote White House chef Sam Kass, who brews the beer in the White House kitchen. 
 
 The White House included recipes for both the honey ale and a honey porter, both of which are brewed at the White House. 
 
 In the video, Kass is seen drinking the honey ale. 
 
 “That is one incredible beer if I do say so myself,” Kass says, smiling. “America, I wish everybody could taste this but we don’t quite brew enough.” 
 
 ___ 
 
 Online: 
 
 White House beer recipe: http://tinyurl.com/97tucgz 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Matthew Daly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC 
 
 Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ||||| Not many people know this, but those hops in your favorite IPA are actually wonderful medicine for insomnia and menopause, thanks to their high phytoestrogen content. These same phytoestrogens, however, might be less desirable for men, as indicated by the common condition known among brewers as Brewer’s Droop. 
 
 Yes, you read that right: Hops are giving men man boobs. 
 
 In the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, herbalist Stephen Herrod Buhner describes the three standard uses of hops in herbal medicine: as a sleep inducer; as a diuretic that successfully promotes urine flow; and finally, as a natural source of phytoestrogen to treat menopause and endometriosis. The herbalist Susan Weed also refers to hops as a nutritive painkiller, a sleep-inducing herb, and as an effective supplement to boost milk production in lactating women. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 That benefits females, but an imbalance of estrogens in men can negatively affect their performance in the bedroom. Herrod further cautions that both brewers and bartenders in England know this all too well: “[From] long-term exposure to the estrogenic properties of hops, [they] eventually have difficulty sustaining erection.” 
 
 I don’t suffer from insomnia and I’m not lactating, so I personally don’t drink beer made with hops; I make my own with wild weeds. Some might call the very concept of hop-less beer heretical, but trust me when I say that medicinal beers are a where it’s at—plus, if brewed properly, they can naturally cure you of what ails you. 
 
 I live in a cottage in Provo, Utah, with the Cascade Mountains—an often overlooked destination in a segment of the Rocky Mountains—just outside my backdoor. And as the weather warms up after the winter, I get excited. It’s finally time for me to start brewing my medicine again. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I usually use yarrow, an herb that is abundant in the mountains here. It’s known as “earth hops” in Scandinavian countries, and the Navajo held it in high regard as an aphrodisiac. But in my backyard, it was just a weed until I started brewing a medicinal beer that I find to bring me relief from colds, fevers, and the flu, among other things. 
 
 Yarrow—like hops—tastes pleasantly bitter. But it has an even stronger aromatic, herbal overtone. In ale, yarrow is a plant that helps you navigate between realms of consciousness. (Thus its other moniker, “the artist’s herb.”) It helps you to see colors more vividly, and its particular traits help the drinker to reach a complete and immediate state of intoxication with only a few sips, as opposed to a six pack. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ever since I could legally drink, I never cared for barley or hops in my beer. I guess you can say that I was born in the wrong era. I’m old-school, like the ale wives of the 1400s. 
 
 Every village in Europe had an ale wife back then, and most indigenous villages across the world had women who had similar roles. Wifery, like husbandry, is a term that meant being married to your craft. It was standard for men to husband livestock, and for women to wife-up medicinal plants and then brew drinks that bound the community together. An ale wife was a medicine woman. She was part of the “cunning folk,” a group of people who kept the ancestral knowledge of plant healing and passed it down from generation to generation. That practice began its decline around 1512, when the earliest industrialists saw the opportunity to turn this woman’s art into an industrial-scale money-making venture. 
 
 Before that date, women crafted ales based on the needs of their community and the particular needs of individuals. When the beer purity laws of 1512 were enacted, most of the medicinal uses for beer—like treating infertility and impotence—went out the window, since all brewers were then only allowed to use hops and barley to flavor their ale. 
 
 We’ll never know exactly how many old recipes were lost, but we do have the remnants of some. For example, one favorite pilsner was made with henbane. If used in the right dosages, the plant can take you on a giddy ride into other realms. But henbane, a member of the deadly nightshade family and a relative of jimson weed, is a trickster and must always be treated with respect. The wrong dosage can induce terror—and in some cases, death. 
 
 I first became enamored with the art of medicinal brewing after learning all of this history; I was overjoyed when I realized how easy it is to brew medicinal beer. When I saw the bubbles and white frothy head of my first batch, I thought: Wow! Me and the microbes did this. 
 
 When I originally started brewing, it was solely an act of civil disobedience. At the time, it was illegal to brew alcohol at home in Utah. This was a remnant of Prohibition, which was really more about the Rockefellers’ financial well-being than it was about the public’s health. The Rockefellers funded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and eliminated alcohol stills from farms countrywide, forcing people to buy waste gasoline for their cars and tractors instead of the clean-burning apple alcohol they used until Prohibition came around. 
 
 In 2009, a group of beer enthusiasts pushed legislation through to make homebrewing in Utah legal. This newfound legality hasn’t stopped the teetotaling constituency of our town to look askance when they hear about alcohol being brewed at home. And our penchant for herbal ales that use neither hops, barley, nor commercial yeast will send your local homebrewing supplier on a fitful rant, muttering about the need for chemical cleansers and the horror of sour-tasting ales. 
 
 If your body isn’t playing well with gluten, then you’ll also sympathize with the our preference for using honey for brewing—like Ethiopian t’ej (honey wine)—instead of grain malt. As a homebrewer, I can attest that these sweeteners also make the homebrewing process easier, as there is no sprouting, malting, and roasting the grains for your mash. 
 
 Remember, beer is originally a tea infusion that you cool, sweeten up, and then let ferment with yeasts. So, think of your favorite IPAs and stouts as being effervescent hop teas, sweetened with different barley malts. 
 
 Unless you’re brewing in commercial amounts, making your own beer doesn’t have to be the precise, formal, and rigid art that it is often presented as. There is an aura of fear that just serves as a barrier to entry for people who might otherwise be interested in many types of fermentation, whether it is pickles or cheese. But brewing is a simple and honest affair that has brought many, many people joy. It can be messy, finicky, exhilarating, and intuitive—and sometimes a little frustrating—but it is always fun. 
 
 When I first started getting into brewing medicinal beers, I just wanted to decrease the amount of ibuprofen that I was taking for cramps, which could get pretty bad. I brewed a sage ale; besides being a common herb used for beer nowadays, sage is believed to be beneficial for women’s issues, like those horrible cramps. 
 
 It turned out to be one of the best-tasting home brews I had made—and it proved to be very effective, not just as a painkiller, but also as a much needed pick-me-up.
– Now anyone with a home-brewing kit can drink President Obama's private beer. The administration gave in today and posted a step-by-step video on how to produce the White House brew, the Washington Post reports. The key ingredients in White House Honey Brown Ale turn out to be amber crystal malt, light malt extract, gypsum, honey, corn sugar, and yeast. But try procuring their fresh honey: It was taken from the South Lawn's first-ever bee hive, according to White House chef Sam Kass. The recipe was inspired by "a local brew shop," Kass admits, and refined with advice from brewers already working at the White House. "As far as we know the White House Honey Brown Ale is the first alcohol brewed or distilled on the White House grounds," even though George Washington distilled whiskey and brewed beer at Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson fermented his own wine, and there was drinking during Prohibition, writes Kass. The recipe revelation comes after a long public campaign that included a petition and Freedom of Information request.