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hayabusa

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I made 10 gallons of a blue moon clone; I am kegging 5 gallons today and leaving 5 gallons in the fementer since the good wife want's me to add fruit to the other half... I've searched the board and seems there are lots of schools of thought...

- use frozen fruit, thaw and dump in fermenter.
- same as above but pasturize in the plastic bag
- use organic puree.... some saay pasturize and some not.

I ferment in a sanke and use a pressurized racking cane to transfer so I am also concerned about using whole chunks since there is no good way for me to put a screen with enough surface area on the tube to prevent clogging and I don't have any carboys..


Finally how much should I use for 5 gallons? Does it differ per fruit, ie. more strawberries then blueberries but less than kiwi, etc?

thanks
-d
 
if your worried abount contamination, oregon fruit purees work great. Whenever i add fruit i use crappy frozen stuff and i thaw and refreeze to breakdown the cell walls. No pasturization. You could try and puree it in a sanitized blender with a little hot water but they would need to be almost all the way thawed or you get gummed up.

As for how much-i used 1#/gallon with a rasberry chocolate stout and it was WAAAAAY to much rasberry flavor- almost tart. I would have gone with 1/2# per gal in hindsight. What fruit were you planning on using?
 
Strawberries - I just went and bought 5lb of frozen berries. I'm not to worried about contamination but more so about racking out of the sanke if I don't hit them with a blender... I do have an immersion blender so I guess I can begin to heat them up and puree them myself that way. I was going to buy puree at the store but it would have been a million dollar batch.

I will take your advice and go for a total of 2.5 lbs since I have no baseline and let her tell me up or down from there.

Either that or use a paint strainer bag and do it in the cornie like a dry-hop.... any reason why I can't just slice them and do that? Does puree vs. slicing them up or "smashing" then impact the potency?

Thanks
 
Strawberries...

Does puree vs. slicing them up or "smashing" then impact the potency?

Thanks

Yes.

I just made a strawberry cider with fresh berries + apple juice. I use a "Mister Squeezo" brand fruit crusher-strainer thingy. It's basically a meat grinder, but made to extract the juice and light puree of the fruit.

Strawberries have a lot of bitter, white tissue on the inside that doesn't hold much sugar or juice. The Mr. Squeezo dumps this material out the end to be discarded. It just squeezes the heck out of it until there's no more juice and then it dumps it out. Out of 4 pounds of strawberries, I got perhaps 2.5 pounds of juice.

So if you just puree the whole berries as-is, you're going to get a lot of unfermentable material. True, it'll probably just settle out and won't affect the final beer, but it does take up fermenter space if that's an issue for you.

So as far as potency of what you're putting into the fermenter, yes, it makes a difference how you strain/puree/crush it.
But as far as the final beer goes? Probably only a minor difference.


You can probably duplicate what the squeezo does with either a basket press or a makeshift type of press. Get a small pan or bowl and something heavy and just crush them and strain off the juice. That's what I'd do, at least.

I also pasteurized my fruit. 140*F for 20 minutes. By taste, I detected no difference in the juice before vs. after so I don't think it'll have a negative affect on the cider.

Good luck!
 
I would recommend possibly going for more strawberries, I had a very hard time getting much flavor from them when I did a wheat. Plus raspberries give off a ton of flavor, maybe the most of any fruit.
 
remeber- if you heat the fruit you deffinitly need pectic enzyme or your probably going to get haze.
 
If you are not confused enough yet, check my recipe for Raspberry Ale. There is a lot of discussion there about how to best use fruits.
 
All great info - thanks...

If this is a wheat beer, it will be naturally hazy so is the pectic enzyme anything more than a fining agent or are there other benefits? I think I am going to use an immersion blender on them since I don't have a juicer and it just seems easier... that will ensure if I get any in the racking tube too it won't clog or use a mesh bag and do it in the cornie all sliced up. I don't want to add water or anything and to use the immersion blender i would need to so thats a big sway to the cornie.. I have access to a juicer but I don't trust it since its a every day use one that may have buggies in it I just can't get to..... ill
 
remeber- if you heat the fruit you deffinitly need pectic enzyme or your probably going to get haze.

only if you boil, as to my understanding.

i just brewed up a wheat, and after a lot of research, have decided to use 7.5# pasteurized frozen/crushed strawberries in my secondary to achieve a medium strawberry taste.

as far as i know, with strawberries, rule of thumb is 5# for a light taste, 7.5# for medium, 10# for heavy.
 
Btw, I don't think it was mentioned, but the purpose of freezing is to break up the cellular walls and exposing more of the sugars and flavors in a similar way that pureeing will.

As far as worrying about transfering from your fermenter, please realize that you will benefit from fermenting in a tertiary fermenter also. To avoid clogging, you may just want to do an old fashioned siphoned transfer. Just put some kind of mark (tape, tie wrap, marker, etc) about an inch or two from its bottom and just keep lowering as the level of the wort/beer lowers, keeping the sucking end out of the fruit mush as long as possible.
 
Might I also suggest blackberries as an alternate to strawberries? LOTS of sugars and they are in season right now. I have two blackberry bushes in the backyard that have exploded in the last week. Was thinking about making a blackberry cobbler ale. I think it may be a fight between SWMBO and me as to who will prevail in the blackberry hording. :D
 
Might I also suggest blackberries as an alternate to strawberries? LOTS of sugars and they are in season right now. I have two blackberry bushes in the backyard that have exploded in the last week. Was thinking about making a blackberry cobbler ale. I think it may be a fight between SWMBO and me as to who will prevail in the blackberry hording. :D

I will try them on the next batch; already bought my strawberries but you definitly have peaked my curiousity.
 
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