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When was the last time anyone tried making a fruit beer?


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#21 Bklmt2000

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Posted 21 April 2017 - 12:30 PM

Strawberry flavor is notorious for being difficult to get into the beverage. I once made a 5 gallon batch of mead with 18# of fresh picked strawberries in it. The aroma was amazing and you could smell the strawberry from the glass at 5 ft. away. Tasty mead but very little strawberry flavor at all. Also if you try to just add more strawberries to account for their subtlety you will be adding a significant amount of water to your beer as they are mostly water.

 

I wonder if you'd get more strawberry flavor by putting them through a blender, strain out the water, freeze the remaining strawberry flesh, and then add that to a beer/mead?

 

Never done this, the idea just popped into my head.



#22 Stains_not_here_man

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Posted 21 April 2017 - 12:51 PM

I wonder if you'd get more strawberry flavor by putting them through a blender, strain out the water, freeze the remaining strawberry flesh, and then add that to a beer/mead?

 

Never done this, the idea just popped into my head.

 

I wonder about these... expensive solution though

 

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#23 Big Nake

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Posted 21 April 2017 - 12:56 PM

All of the questions being brought up are exactly why I end up either scrapping the idea or using a store-bought extract. I think I understand all of the variables but I don't have the time to try to make a bunch of different versions to see which one makes the best beer. I like raspberries and I like the idea of raspberries in beer but strawberries may be my favorite fruit so I'm always looking to find a way to get them into a beer. The extracts that I find for strawberry are always artificial so I avoid it.

#24 armagh

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Posted 21 April 2017 - 01:40 PM

I think Armagh has muddied my thinking a little bit because now I don't know if the fruit should be in secondary with the yeast allowed to metabolize it or add the fruit to cold beer so that the yeast is dormant. If I choose the latter, the beer would need to remain cold which is not an issue because once beer goes into a keg here, it's kept cold. But the difference between those two concepts could be big... the former might scrub out a lot of the fruit flavor and also dry out the beer. The latter might allow more of the fruit character into the beer but the sugars would remain so you might have to use less. This is definitely one reason why extract exists. I also just remembered that I went onto a website (OliveNation or something?) that carried A LOT of fruit extracts. I bought raspberry and also blackberry but when they arrived I wasn't really very impressed with their aroma. I probably should have dropped a little into a glass and tapped a beer on top of them but I either didn't do that or I *did* do that and didn't care for the flavor.

Sorry.  If we we're talking peaches or apricots, I'd have a ton of good ideas, but as you've read in this thread, strawberries are bear to deal with.



#25 Big Nake

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Posted 21 April 2017 - 01:57 PM

Sorry.  If we we're talking peaches or apricots, I'd have a ton of good ideas, but as you've read in this thread, strawberries are bear to deal with.

Don't be sorry... that's why I posted it here so that I would either get some good ideas or someone smarter than me would talk me out of it. :lol: I can't help thinking that there is a way to do this but I have failed far more than I have succeeded so I should probably keep quiet. :P

#26 armagh

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Posted 22 April 2017 - 06:37 AM

Don't want to use the "D-word" here because it's illegal, but one can make tinctures with herbs and fruit in ways that are legal.  Went to a workshop on it many years ago and have forgotten most of it but a tincture of strawberries added at packaging could work, at least for kegging.  The high alcohol content of a tincture would render any other way of trying to elicit carbonation unlikely.  An internet search might yield some results.



#27 shaggaroo

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Posted 22 April 2017 - 07:52 AM

last fruit beer I made was a while ago... it was a Belgian Kriek bier... I broke the skins on the cherries and then froze them because I knew I also wanted the pits in contact with the beer... when I was ready to use them I added them in after the saccharomyces had done their job, then let them sit for a good 6 months while the funky magic was happening... as I recall, I used about 1 lb of cherries per gallon of beer. YMMV



#28 denny

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Posted 22 April 2017 - 12:27 PM

The ROT for fruit is 1 lb./gal., but for strawberries you'd need at least twice that.  Truthfully, for strawberries, extract is probably the way to go.



#29 SchwanzBrewer

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Posted 22 April 2017 - 02:53 PM

Club member made a strawberry gose for the last meeting and it was excellent.

I haven't made a fruit beer in a long time, but I'm thinking about doing a cherry dubbel down the line.


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