fruitcake ale... what dried fruits?

Hey all! So my fruitcake ale is just about completed... need to see what would go with a punch of ceylon cinnamon and a lighter porter base... slightly chocolate brown deep ale... no hop punch and slightly bittered but barely sweet from the samples... I'm thinking about a pound of raisens.... pound of dates and maybe some dried oranges... any other ideas on what to add?

Figs. Ginger and cranberry would be another idea... but I'm not so sure about the cranberry

There's a fruitcake old ale recipe in Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing...I'll try and pull my copy out and post what fruits are in that recipe...

FWIW, I tasted the results of that recipe recently as part of the "12 beers of christmas" share several of us just did, and it came out excellently!

biochemedic said:

There's a fruitcake old ale recipe in Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing...I'll try and pull my copy out and post what fruits are in that recipe...

FWIW, I tasted the results of that recipe recently as part of the "12 beers of christmas" share several of us just did, and it came out excellently!

Click to expand...

thats what i had gotten my recipe from!
however.. i lost the recipe, and the brew shop i went to didn't have a ton of the grain i needed (just a recently opened one shop, they've since upgraded everything) so i had to sub a ton, but my god.. it's glorious!

So I looked up that recipe in the book again, and it says you can use "whatever" dried fruits, but it specifically mentions raisins, apricots, cherries and blueberries as possiblilities, so I get the idea you should choose a mix of different fruits. 3 lbs total dried fruit, rehydrated with boiling water, then rack the fermented beer onto the mix.

Sweet, thanks!
much appreciated.

biochemedic said:

There's a fruitcake old ale recipe in Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing...I'll try and pull my copy out and post what fruits are in that recipe...

FWIW, I tasted the results of that recipe recently as part of the "12 beers of christmas" share several of us just did, and it came out excellently!

Click to expand...

I brewed this beer for Christmas 2011. I used dried tart cherries, raisins, dried cranberries and dried apricots.

The dried cherries really dominated. I think I used 12 oz. For this year I'm going to cut that in half and add more cranberries.

The dried apricots had sulfides. I'm not sure if that affected my yeast or not. But they didn't really add anything to the flavor so I'll probably leave them out next time. I may try adding some prunes instead.

well i ended up eyeballing it at the store, they only have the highly unaccurate poundage scales.
ended up using...
3.5 oz cranberries
5.5 oz raisens
3.5 oz cherries.

just covered them in water and boiled them for 15-20 minutes, letting them cool off then i'm dumping them on in!