stageseven
Well-Known Member
So my friend an I decided to throw caution to the wind with our second brew and make up our own recipe. Our first beer, a Brewer's Best Brown Ale kit, turned out great and we were feeling pretty good about the brewing process. We decided we wanted to do a raspberry wheat beer next. We headed over to our LHBS and just picked out ingredients based on whatever we thought would taste good. Unfortunately when we went to secondary we realized raspberries aren't in season, so we ended up getting a pound of cherries instead.
We knew we had to pasturize the cherries, so we pitted them (yeah, we didn't buy seedless), blended them up and pasturized following instructions here. However, when we went to siphon into the bottling bucket we noticed a problem. The cherries were blended into small enough pieces that the siphon was sucking them up. Bottling was a pain too, since some pieces would clog the bottling wand and keep it from closing all the way, or go through the wand straight into the beer.
So how do you guys deal with this issue? Some sort of strainer in the bottling bucket? Smashing the fruit instead of blending so you dont' end up with small peices? I'm sure most of the chunks will drop to the bottom of the bottle so they won't end up in the glass, so I'm not too worried about it, but I'd like to avoid it in the future.
We're calling the beer Chewy Cherry Wheat. It actually tasted pretty good, and smells like a Belgian beer.
We knew we had to pasturize the cherries, so we pitted them (yeah, we didn't buy seedless), blended them up and pasturized following instructions here. However, when we went to siphon into the bottling bucket we noticed a problem. The cherries were blended into small enough pieces that the siphon was sucking them up. Bottling was a pain too, since some pieces would clog the bottling wand and keep it from closing all the way, or go through the wand straight into the beer.
So how do you guys deal with this issue? Some sort of strainer in the bottling bucket? Smashing the fruit instead of blending so you dont' end up with small peices? I'm sure most of the chunks will drop to the bottom of the bottle so they won't end up in the glass, so I'm not too worried about it, but I'd like to avoid it in the future.
We're calling the beer Chewy Cherry Wheat. It actually tasted pretty good, and smells like a Belgian beer.