Adding Fruit to Beer July 25 2014, 0 Comments
Brewing up a fruit beer this summer? It's awesome to use real strawberries or peaches, but you can also supplement those natural fruit flavors with some of our fruit flavors and extracts. Just a little goes a long way in creating that summertime flavor and feeling!
If you are adding actual fruit, our two favorite times to add the fruit are:
- Right when you turn off the heat of your boil and start to cool down the wort. This pasteurizes the fruit so you don't get an infection without cooking off too much of the fruit character.
- In the secondary fermenter. If you do this and you're using fruit you picked or bought, we recommend either pasteurizing, blanching, or using metabisulfites to kill off any bacteria that may be in the fruit. If you use a canned puree or fruit base, you can just add it directly to the secondary, it's already been pasteurized.
If you are adding the fruit flavorings or extracts, you can add them at any point, we recommend doing it right at bottling or kegging, so you can nail the amount perfectly.
A great way to get a fantastic fruit character in your beer, cider, or mead, is to start with actual fruit and then supplement the character with the fruit flavorings at bottling time if necessary.