New experiment with adding fruit to a recipe.

I had a really nice recipe pop into my head today. I was eating these awesome black berry's when I thought to myself. Why not make sometype of blackberry beer.

I decided to maybe make this awesome ginger beer I made over the summer and somehow add blackberries to the mix. For x-mas SWMBO recieved a food processor. Now is it okay for me to maybe throw a bunch of blackberries in the processor to make them into some type of puree??? Then maybe throw it in secondary or even the bottleing bucket??

Has anyone used a food processor to puree fruit before?

I have pureed fruit that way but not for beer. Simply freeze the fruit to break down the fruit, then put the thawed fruit into semi-hot wort or into the secondary so you don;t get an overly hazy brew.

B

I figured if i used the food processor I extract more of the flavor from the fruit...

got to be in secondary, too much sugar to do it at bottling. However, you won't end up with a great blackberry taste, just the "esence" of it, and the beer is a strange looking purple.

My Blackberry blond wasn't bad, but not quite what I had thought it would be.

Oh I see well... I don't want too much blackberry flavor anyway. I'll prolly just add the whole blackberries to secondary...

Just made a recipe where I added a pound of apples to an APA.

Pealed, cored,and quartered the apples. Froze them to help break down cellular tissue. On brew day, I let the apples sit out and thaw (thew really turn to mush) and I threw them in a processor with about a half cup of water. Poured the mix in a small pot, and brought to a near simmer for about a half hour to sterilize the fruit. (I also added some clove honey to my recipe to add ABV and for some of the clove flavor, I put this in my apple mix). Then I added this mix the last 10 minutes of my wort boil.

I didn't want to add to my secondary and deal with cleaning a fruity-scummy carboy. Came out pretty good with a hint of apple. I've read that typical fruit beers use 5 pounds of fruit (never made one myself).

wouldnt blackberries change the collor of my brew??

just make sure you do something to get them clean and dont just throw them in the fermenter all willy nilly. Bacteria love fruit.

I've done 2 raspberry wheats that were very good. Bought 5 pounds of frozen raspberries (apparently being frozen breaks down the cell walls). Fermented my standard wheat beer as normal for 3 weeks.
Soaked Raspberries in star-san for half and hour then added whole raspberries to carboy and racked beer on top to secondary. Let the beer sit for 3-4 weeks then racked to bottling bucket and bottled as normal.
You can puree the berries but I don't think its necessary, after 3 weeks in secondary my raspberries were white from the yeast stripping all their sugars I don't think you'd get any more flavor from puring the fruit. Good luck.

jonbomb said:

wouldnt blackberries change the collor of my brew??

Click to expand...

Yes. Depending on the original color of the brew and how many you use it will end up somewhere from light purple to dark purple I'd guess.