Fruit beer secondary: cold vs. warm

Anyone have any experience or thoughts about this?

I'm about to make a blueberry wheat with fresh picked berries, and someone asked me if I was going to pasteurize the berries. I'm not, but that got me thinking about putting the beer in the fridge for the secondary fermentation, for the time when it will be sitting on the blueberries. Which leads me to the following questions...

Would a cold secondary help preserve the fresh blueberry flavor & aroma?

Would it help prevent wild yeasts or bacteria from getting a toehold on my beer?

Would it just be a waste of fridge space? (sadly not a problem right now)

Thoughts?

Adding fresh picked berries to a normal wheat beer is just asking for an infection.

I would sanitize them in Star-San, then freeze them to break the skins, then add them to the beer at room temperature.

Most of the recommendations I have seen suggest adding the fruit into secondary, and let it sit at the same temp as the original fermentation since it will ferment out the sugars in the fruit. Freezing the fruit is what others have recommended as well, this plus the alcohol will suppress infections - so it has been said.

There are some good threads here on the topic - so I recommend a search.

I'm doing one now with blueberry puree - its sterile so no issues, and more consistent from batch to batch.

Good luck

If it's in the fridge, it's not a secondary fermentation, as your yeast won't ferment anything at 35F. I would pasteurize or do it Amanda's way.

kingwood-kid said:

If it's in the fridge, it's not a secondary fermentation, as your yeast won't ferment anything at 35F. I would pasteurize or do it Amanda's way.

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Good point. It's so obvious that I completely overlooked the need to ferment the sugars that the berries have. Looks like I'll be pasteurizing, since most of the berries will have been per-crushed.

The best fruit beers I made were when I crash cool beer after fermenting, removing as much yeast as possible with gelatine or long term cold crash then add fruit in keg and keep it cold until consumed.
Con: Does not work if you bottle