Cherries in the Snow ?

traderearl · 08-16-2007, 08:01 PM

Has anyone tried the "Cherries in the Snow" recipe from the Complete joy of Homebrewing book?

My question is if you did the recipe did you use the sour cherries it requested or just any cherries you could get. I could only get sweet cherries and I tasted it when I racked it into secondary last night and it did not seem to have a lot of cherry flavor or much taste to brag about at all. I realize that this beer is supposed to get better with age so is that why it is so bland?

Thanks

rdwj · 08-16-2007, 08:03 PM

I've never made the recipe, but am curious how you processed the cherries?

traderearl · 08-16-2007, 08:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rdwj

I've never made the recipe, but am curious how you processed the cherries?

De-stemmed and de-pitted by hand 10lbs of cherries

lot of time, not much fun, think hack and slash horror film, stained a good shirt with cherry juice.

Then placed cherries in sanitized bowl and crushed with a potato masher to get juice, put cherries in grain bags which went into boiling wort with juice, this lowered temp to 165 roughly and sat for 15 mins to pastuerize.

rdwj · 08-16-2007, 08:13 PM

I've always heard that you shouldn't add fruit to the boil; it's supposed to added to the secondary. Did the recipe call for that procedure? I've made a couple of cherry beers and the flavor is pretty strong using one pound per gallon.

Hopefully it improves with age, but from my limited experience with fruit, I think it tends to mellow.

traderearl · 08-16-2007, 08:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rdwj

I've always heard that you shouldn't add fruit to the boil; it's supposed to added to the secondary. Did the recipe call for that procedure? I've made a couple of cherry beers and the flavor is pretty strong using one pound per gallon.

Hopefully it improves with age, but from my limited experience with fruit, I think it tends to mellow.

Yes the recipe called for adding it to the boil, and this is 10lbs of cherries with hops and LME, you would think this would have huge cherry flavor. Yeah I was under the impression that aging would just mellow it out too, not make it more flavorful, so I am assuming that there just must be a big difference in using sweet cherries instead of sour. The cherries were definately ripe and good and he states this recipe is one of most people favorites in his book.

BTW I thought you just weren't supposed to boil the fruit mainly because of the haziness it would create in the beer? What is your process and how are you processing your cherries. I would think by adding to the secondary you would run a huge risk of infection but I am still new to homebrewing.

rdwj · 08-16-2007, 09:43 PM

The last batch of cherry wheat I made, I used campden tablets to kill anything funky. The tile before that, I headed my slurry to about 145 (I think). All things considered, when adding to the secondary, you don't have to be AS careful because there is alcohol present in the beer that will kill most of what you would normally worry about.

traderearl · 08-16-2007, 11:43 PM

That is a good idea I hadn't thought about using campden with beer. But, I am hoping that I can figure out what is making the beer so bland as the only two things I did not follow out of the recipe were using sweet instead of sour cherries and the recipe did not call for removing pits, but I would think that leaving them in would just make it bitter.

It is hard for me to believe it is bland with as red as the beer is.

Thanks for your help and replies btw.

traderearl · 08-17-2007, 06:25 PM

I take it not many people have tried this recipe

Evan! · 08-17-2007, 06:40 PM

I tried a similar recipe...couldn't get enough cherries, so I used a combination of sour cherries and cranberries. Turned out to be very yummy, but I don't know about using sweet cherries...

Ó Flannagáin · 08-17-2007, 09:27 PM

If the flavor isn't enough for you, why not add a bit more to secondary? Would up the ABV a little, but that's not necessarily a bad thing