I wanted to brew up a strawberry beer for the ladies so I started with a simple all extract lager recipe, 4 lbs of mashed strawberries and about a pound of honey. The brew went fine and I added the strawberries at the end (after I cut the heat to the boil and let things cool down a bit) to pasteurize things but now here's my question... did I make a mistake by leaving the fruit in the carboy during the reaction? I definitely plan a secondary pitch as soon as the reaction stops but for some reason I have a bad feeling about leaving the fruit in there while the yeast does it's job.
Not an expert on fruit beers (never done one), but most folks seem to recommend freezing the clean fruit to burst the cells, then just dumping them into the secondary. The idea of the secondary is to reduce the activity of the primary fermentation and maybe keep a little more of the aroma (since there will be less CO2 flowing out to "scrub" the aroma out as well). So... having the fruit in there with the yeast should be no problem at all!
That's good to know... these were actually frozen before I started so I guess I got lucky there. I just thought you needed to steep them in a 160 degree batch to pasteurize them first, but I never considered adding them to a secondary pitch to retain flavor. I'll give that a try next time!!
Most think that clean fruit is OK without pasteurizing. Certainly by secondary time the beer isn't to hospitable to the non-yeast organisms, perhaps that's it.
The fruit has it's own yeast. It may, or may not, predominate the yeast you pitch. Don't care.
Secondary yeast to make sure most of the sugar is fermented? I don't know about that . . . my ladies like sweet . . . I like alcohol.
Brewing for the ladies . . . add dextrin.
Brewing for ladies is a waste of effort- in my opinion.
Save yourself time. Women's like liquor - take some good quality rum (not scotch, in a pinch corn whiskey) add extract flavor and sugar as per the instructions (sweet counts) . They will suck it down and think you're a genius. Or, that's what works for me . . .
I buy a $4 bottle of extract chocolate or cherry put it into a fifth of rum $9, and I'm a f**cking brewing genius. And it beats the $25 bottle of chocolate liqueur (according to the "little lady")
My wife doesn't like beer. I made ginger beer, mead, unhopped barley wine, etc. She didn't like any of it (but she will drink commercial wine). Poured a bottle (2 ounces) of chocolate liqueur concentrate in rum and I was gold. Vodka? don't waste the time . . .
In other words: brew to make yourself happy, nobody's taste but your own's counts. If you can find a way to keep the wife happy, do it.
My OL did sort of like the ginger beer - it was like champagne - dry with lots of small bubbles. Sweeten it, and it would have worked (I believe). But God gave me beer - why waste time on whine?
I just brewed my second batch of cherry wheat using that technique. Prior, I had always pasteurized the fruit by adding after the end of boil. I must admit that I'm still a bit leary of the presence of bacteria and wild yeast strains in the fruit: I sulfite the cherries a few days before adding the brew to the secondary. I've had great success. Cherries are acidic enough to do this. I haven't tried using other fruits in beer.
Anyway, the difference is like night and day as far as aroma! Heat doesn't seem to affect the flavor as much, but then smell is a big part of taste anyway.
Oh I agree with you 100%... I guess I'm just lucky in the fact that my wife does actually like beer... and not the sweet syrupy fruit beers either, she just wanted something light for summer and I had made a watermelon beer once that she loved. She'll actually drink anything up to a porter and enjoy it... of course it took me several years to get her to this point!
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