fruit brewing help

I am starting my planning for my next batch which is a cherry brown ale. Ive decided to go with a sterilized cherry puree. my question is how do you determine how much fruit to put in. I do not like extremely fruity beer, i am looking for a nice aroma and light cherry taste. I know that you cant boil fruit so would it be a good choice to steep the puree after the boil then send to the primary or just go straight to the primary with it.

any good opinion would help

If you just want a little flavor, then try adding 1 can of it to primary. Fermentation will take care of most of it, so you should be left with just a slight flavor.

I made a cherry wheat some time ago using 1 can (46 oz, I think) of Oregon cherry puree. A slight noticeable cherry taste. For my tastes, I'd bump it up to 2 cans, but one worked just fine. I would start with that and use that as a guideline to adjust later.

I am interested in the same so I decided to break up 1 5 gallon batch into mini batches.. and run tests on all of them with different amounts of 2 different fruits.

batch 1- 1 gallon + xfruit1
batch 2- 1 gallon +2xfruit1

and the same for 3 and 4 but with a new fruit.. maybe even zest from citrus

One trick is to wait til after fermentation is totally done, then pull off like a cup of beer. Dose it with 1 teaspoon of your fruit puree and see how it tastes. Once you find an amount that tastes good, do the math on how many tablespoons to add to 5 gallons and you're good to go.

Frozen cherries work well too and they are probably cheaper. I made a Belgian Cherry Blonde in 2009 and it turned out very cherry. I probably went overboard and used 5 pounds. I didn't take into consideration the light flavor that the blonde will have. I racked the beer onto the frozen cherries let them sit for five days. A brown ale will cover up a lot of the fruit flavor with such a dark malt bill, so if it were me I'd use 2 lbs frozen cherries to get a nice subtle flavor. Good luck!