How do they flavor beer?

How do they flavor beer?

My local microbrewery has seasonal brews that include vanilla, raspberry, blueberry and honey flavored beer. Do they just take there pale ale recipe and add the appropriate flavor or do they add real fruit, honey, or vanilla? Can anyone describe how it is done?

Reply to
FTAforever
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On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 21:37:49 -0600, "FTAforever" said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

Fruit beer uses real fruit. At least, that's the way home brewers do it. After primary fermentation you rack the beer over fruit in the secondary fermenter.

Commercially, who knows? After all, Budweiser is 60% rice and, I believe, they use a single grass seed per fermenter as "hops". (Wouldn't want to add any flavor, would we?).

Vanilla is probably done with extract. I never heard of anyone racking over vanilla beans, although it would probably work.

Honey flavored beer? Probably racked over honey, although mead is a more common way of using honey in an alcoholic beverage.

You can also use spices to flavor beer. (I guess vanilla could properly be considered a spice.)

Reply to
Al Klein

The flavors are done any number of ways. At the commercial level, the vanilla is probably extract. Homebrewers either use extract (either storebought, or beans steeped in vodka) or rack the beer right onto the beans.

Fruit flavors a generally fruit puree, though fruit extracts are available at both commercial and homebrew levels.

Honey can be added almost anywhere in the process. At the beginning of the boil, most of the flavor is boiled off, so all it adds is fermentable sugars. At the end of the boil, much of the flavor stays. Some also add honey at bottling or kegging to get more of the aroma.

The type of beer used can vary greatly. Some type of lightly hopped pale ale will let the more delicate flavors come through. Darker beers can be used for heavier flavors such as a Black Cherry Stout or a Vanilla Porter.

There are many number of ways to play around with added flavors. My favorite is a hazelnut coffee stout.

Wayne Bugeater Brewing Company

Reply to
Wayne

depends on the brewery. you can use the real thing, or you can use extracts and other additives.

Reply to
Alan McKay

Some breweries (and homebrewers) use whole fruit. E.g., New Glarus Brewing uses whole cherries in their Belgian Red, and I use whole cherries in my various cherry meads and (occasionally) beer.

Reply to
Joel

"Home brewers either use extract (either store-bought, or beans steeped in vodka)

So I need to steep the beans in vodka and

this will produce a vanilla extract that I can

add to the brew? How exactly should I go

about doing this?

"or rack the beer right onto the beans." How exactly do you rack beer?

Thanks for the information.

Thanks for the information.

Reply to
FTAforever

"Rack" is the term used when transfering from one vessel to another. I haven't used vanilla in any of my beers yet, but I recently made a vanilla mead that I used a bean with. You'll get more (stronger)flavor that way. IMHO

Cheers

FTAforever wrote:

Reply to
DragonTail

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 21:52:27 -0600, "FTAforever" said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

That means "transfer". You transfer the beer from the primary fermenter to a secondary fermenter that has vanilla beans lying in the bottom of the fermenter.

Reply to
Al Klein

FTAforever did raise a incidentally a question that I had been interested in when considering a flavored beer. What is a good beer style to which one did adds the extracts or flavoring?

Reply to
noonancm

Reply to
DragonTail

raspberry,

A great brewpub (Stewarts Brewing Co. in Bear, DE) I used to go to had four flavors for their hefewizen. The pure hefe, a hefe with (I forget raspberry, blueberry, and something else, I always got mine straight). When you ordered they put a shot of pure fruit puree in the glass and poured over it. Pretty much the same as putting puree in the bottling bucket but this way you could easily get all added flavors or none at all.

Aaron

Reply to
asig98

On 10 Feb 2005 19:09:42 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@msn.com said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

Not really. The flavors marry much better if the beer sits on the fruit for a few weeks (or more, depending on the beer).

Reply to
Al Klein

It depends a lot on your own personal tastes.

But a light American-style wheat beer seems like a popular choice for adding fruit. I personally like a blond ale with fruit. Pretty much any style that lets the fruit flavor shine through would work, though. Another option is finding stronger flavors that marry well. I think strong bitterness clashes with sour fruit-- raspberry, sour cherries, etc. OTOH I brewed a dark mild with tart cherries that I really liked. Some people really like Bell's Cherry Stout from Kalamazoo Brewing in Michigan, though I think the flavors clash. One advantage of working with extracts is that you can use a bit in any glass of beer and see what you think of the result.

Reply to
Joel

My brother gave me a Mr. Beer refill kit.. It's the thought that counts, I guess.. and I decided to experiment with it. I bought a 750ml bottle of raspberry flavored syrup, meant to flavor espresso drinks, and poured it into the wort at the end of the boil. The result had a wine-like sourness (I don't much like wine), but the raspberry aroma came through well enough. I might try it again some day with a decent beer recipe.

Karl S.

Reply to
Karl S.

I won't point any fingers, but there is a brewery in the Atlanta area that has a blueberry flavored beer. They claim to use fresh blueberries but I'm not so gullible. One of their ex-brewers defected to our brewery and of course, brewing techniques were compared...

Did you know that propylene glycol is considered a "food grade" product? Hmmm.

Reply to
Duck Redbeard

When transferring to secondary, would you mush up the fruit, blueberry for example to give the fruit flavours more direct contact with the beer?

Reply to
Josh Button

You freeze the fruit first and then thaw. This breaks the cell walls so all the juice becomes available for flavor and ferment. Works better than just mashing it up.

Wayne Bugeater Brewing Company

Reply to
Wayne

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 20:12:32 -0600, Wayne said in alt.beer.home-brewing:

I used to "process" the fruit when it was frozen - put it into a food processor and turn it to a fine powder.

Works for making fruit flavored ice cream too.

Reply to
Al Klein

There's food grade propylene glycol, if that's what you mean. It's not such a terrible thing, really.

Reply to
Joseph Michael Bay

It can also be produced by bacterial fermentation, so it may be present in trace quantities in beer already. I've not the time to do the research tho'.

The original worry sounds like a case of "chemonomenophobia" perhaps.

I wonder if folks would drink beer if they knew how much dihydrogenmonoxide it contained... ;-)

--arne

Reply to
arne thormodsen

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