this is my first post in what seems like ages.
I'm currently fermenting a blueberry blonde. There are several ways to add fruit flavor to your beers. All have pros and cons. You could buy extracts, canned purees, or use fresh / frozen fruit. From what I've read here a lot of people agree that if you use an extract you can end up with a weird extract like twinge to your final product. I haven't heard anything bad about canned puree, but when I looked into using some for this brew the price made me turn away and try for using fresh / frozen fruit. A rule of thumb that I read on BYO was that you should start off adding roughly a half pound of fruit per gallon of beer. For my batch here I added 3 lbs (a half pound extra because I didn't want to hold onto the extra half pound). To sanitize the fruit I pureed it in my food processor added it to a pot with a cup or two of water (in an effort to stop the berries from turning to jelly while I boiled them, i've also read that you can mix fresh fruit puree with campden tablets that are used with making wine) and boiled for 10 minutes. I funneled them into an empty secondary then siphoned the primary on top. It gave the blonde an interesting purple color. after about 3 to 4 weeks in the secondary I siphoned into a tertiary as there was a huge amount of sediment in the bottom. while siphoning the color in the siphoning tube looked really great, not too purple, almost like a beer I've had from bluepoint breweries on Long Island where I'm originally from. Next week I will be bottling, the beer will only have been in the tertiary for one week, just an effort to drop any other fruit bits that might still have been stuck in suspension and to help further clear it. I'll be priming with a full cup of corn sugar as its been explained to me that a slightly higher carbonation will hell the aromatics of the final product.
My recipe for the "Blue Eyed Blonde" is as follows:
3.3 lbs extra light dme
3.3 lbs light dme
.5 lbs carapils
1 oz cascade @ 60 min
1 oz cascade @ 15 min
Pitched Wyeast 1056 American Ale
3 lbs Frozen Blueberries (in secondary)
here is a good article on byo regarding adding fruit to beer
Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Recipes - Fruit Brew, Part 2: Techniques
hope this helped out!
Blueberry Wheat Help
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