Strawberry in Beer

So I know there are a ton of threads about this but I have a hard time wading through them all.

I am about to move my beer to the secondary and I want to add 7 pounds of strawberries to the beer but I don't know if I should use fresh or frozen and how I should prep the berries before adding them to the secondary. Please let me know what you think!

Chop the berries in smallish pieces and freeze them. Freezing kills the bad yeast and bacteria on the berries' skin and breaks down the cell walls.

Thaw, put in carboy and rack your beer onto them.

Pappers_ said:

Chop the berries in smallish pieces and freeze them. Freezing kills the bad yeast and bacteria on the berries' skin and breaks down the cell walls.

Thaw, put in carboy and rack your beer onto them.

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Would it work if I just bought frozen berries, thawed them, and added to the secondary?

- Destem and then blanch the berries in boiling water for a few seconds (~15 or so). Dip in cold water after.
- Freeze slowly for a couple days (bagged, inside a styrofoam container or similar if possible). Insulated freezing slows the ice crystal formation and allows for larger crystals that destroy more cell walls (freeing those juices and flavors you want). If not just freeze in a ziploc normally.
- Thaw and use. Freezing alone won't kill the baddies on your fruit. Only a small portion of them.

I just (last night in fact) moved my strawberry smash to the serving keg, where it is chilling and carbing.
All I did was buy a 5# bag of frozen, sliced strawberries from sams club, put them in a sanitized 5 gallon paint strainer bag, put a sanitized wire twist on it, and threw it into a bucket, still frozen. Racked the beer on top, put it back in the ferm chamber for two weeks at 65.
The warm and flat sample last night was quite nice, cant wait to try it chilled and carbed!

So do the manufacturing companies that make frozen strawberries blanch their product or pasteurize them or something before they are frozen and shipped out?

I dunno. We'll see if I drop dead from using frozen berries, although I'm certainly not the first.
Use what you feel comfortable with - if you want to blanch and pasteurize, do it up. It's your beer after all.

O'Haggerty said:

- Freezing alone won't kill the baddies on your fruit. Only a small portion of them.

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I'm sure freezing doesn't sterilize the fruit, but we're not going for sterile, just sanitized. I've been told that freezing will take care of the wild yeasts and other bacteria that we typically worry about when brewing. Is this not true?