carls47807

Recipes 

I have a question as I have never used extracts before.

I do all grain batches, and I have made a lot of wheat beers. I want to start using apricot, blueberry, etc. extracts, but I'm not sure how much to add. I see a lot of 4oz bottles, but they all say add to taste.

If I do a regular ~15IBU, 1.045 wheat, how much extract is too much?

I'm guessing these extracts are dextrins, unfermentables? What if they ferment in my bottles and blow crap up (i've had stuff blow up before, so I'm always really nervous).

I've tried using diff. hops and yeasts to get extract character (as I think extracts are kind of cheap and cheating), and I had real good luck with amarillo's, but I think I want to try them anyways, just for kicks.

Dark_Ale

Recipes 

Some of those extracts are powerful, and some dont even taste like the extract they are suppose to be, I had some blackberry a while back it smelled or tasted nothing like blackberry.
You can get a dropper, and take the extract and place 1 drop in a clean sanitized beer bottle, take another bottle 2 drops, another 3 drops all the way up to a teaspoon if you'd like or more even. Then siphon your beer into the bottle. let it carbonate see which one you like the best. figure up how many bottles worth of beer you have next time and add that many drops.....I'm sure there is a easier way, I always do it the hard way.
canned fruits work pretty good I hear in the secondary,
Good luck

carls47807

Recipes 

thanks, that's a good idea. we have calibrated micropipetters in biochem lab, maybe I'll borrow one, haha.

i've put blueberries in secondary, but all the sugars obviously fermented out and i was left with a purple beer that needed millions of seeds filtered out (won't do that again). It tasted pretty good though, somewhat sour.

Blender

Recipes 

I have not done anything like this before but many times I have read that you can mix the extract to taste when it is in the bottling bucket. Just keep adding until satisfied.

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Gary

Bad Shark Brew

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I did a rapsberry wheat a while back. I used the 2 oz bottle of rapsberry extract from AHS and it took a few months for the flavoring to mellow to the point where the beer was remtoely drinkable. I just brewed a wheat where I put fresh oranges (peels removed) right into the boil and it turned out pretty good after a 5 weeks.

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homebrewer_99

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I've used several flavorings in the past and have been disappointed with every last one of them. Most of them make the beer taste like soapy water.

I do not recommend anything except real fruit.

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HB Bill

Anthony_Lopez

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Interesting... We brewed a blueberry wheat that was bottled last week after 10 days in primary and 2 weeks in secondary. We used 4 oz of blueberry extract to 5 gallons of beer which was what our most trusted LHBS suggested for our recipe. The first sample bottle will be tasted next weekend after 2 weeks in bottles. I'll let you know how it is...

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carls47807

Recipes 

Thanks!

I've tried real fruit, my issue is that they are 99% fermentables and the sweet flavor disappears.

That reminds me, I did a beer once and I put 2 cans of pumpkin pie mix in the mash tun, it came out really good, try it some time.