A Summer Fruit Brew (need advice!)

I've been browsing the forums and can't seem to find anything quite what I'm looking for in the recipe world. My goal is basically this: A refreshing and crisp wheat/witbier with the addition of fruit (specifically lychee fruit, it's a very subtle flavor that I kind of equate to strawberry so I'm thinking of using an extract if I can find it although I'd prefer using real fruit). Here's the kicker, I want to make this fairly high gravity (around 8 or 9%) if possible.


I was thinking about starting with either a big gavity blue moon clone recipe I found or the beer in the link below but removing the orange and fermenting with a high-tolerant yeast, then putting everything on lychee fruit in secondary and bottling with a little extract (although again, avoiding the extract if possible):
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f37/orange-saison-57342/


I'm still a fairly new brewer and I'm sure I'm leaving something out or not thinking right somewhere along the lines. Any help would be much appreciated!

I'm not familiar with lychee fruit at all, but every time I've read about someone using strawberries they talk about having to use 2lb/gal or so before the fruit flavor becomes readily apparent. You probably don't want to hear this, but I'd start out with a 5% simple wheat beer the first time out and then tweak it from there. I've found with any specialty ingredient, you need to understand how it interacts with beer before you throw it in with a ton of other things on top of it.

I made a peach wheat last summer! It was fantastic, the keg was gone in notime!

mattldm, any tips/grain bills that I can take a look at? I'm still not comfortable making my own bill from scratch so any reference point would be useful, even though the fruit levels will be way different.

whatsleftofyou, good point. I might end up doing that. I'm going to feel tempted to at least shoot for 6 or 7% though

I figured on the 2lb/gallon for lychee (like I said, it seems like it will be similar to strawberry, but it's a very unique fruit so who knows?). At 8 or 10lbs of fruit, it might be cost prohibitive but I may use strawberries instead if this plan falls-through. I was planning on freezing/unfreezing to break down the cells a bit, then soaking in vodka for a day or two before adding to secondary for about 2-3 weeks.


In case I need a backup, any good, strong strawberry wheat brew recipes out there?