Sanitizing fruit with ozone

Did a quick search on this topic and came up empty.

Last year I brewed an extract wheat saison about 7%, and racked it onto 5# of organic apricots I picked in the Niagara region. I bubbled ozone through a stone weighted to the bottom of a bucket filled with water and the apricots for about an hour agitating it once in a while.

I rinsed them with sterilized water and proceeded to rack the beer onto the fruit, let sit for 4 days at 60F and then racked the beer into clean carboy, and let it sit for another month before bottling.

The beer turned out great, and I was considering doing the same again this year, but I'm wondering if I got lucky with that batch. Are there any other folks using this method to kill off bugs and such in fresh fruit?

interesting concept....i've only ever used ozone with hydroponic applications and water sterilization but this is a bit outside the box. If it worked for you before i would say you did it correctly since peaches can harbor some funk and im just sorry i never thought of it before. So you only let it sit on the peaches for 4 days? thats not a ton of time- why so little?

Sounds like a method that works. Since you picked them off of the tree, they wouldn't have been sanatized in any other method. I'm surprised you need to rinse them though because the water would have been clean, and the ozone should have killed anything - or your method won't have worked at all. I'd also be a little concerned about putting a large amount of O3 around... (or O2 for that matter)

Personally since I also do wine, I would have made a mix of water and peach and metabisulfite, waited 24 hours and then mixed with the beer.

It was my first fruit (and only thus far) beer, so I figured 4 days was plenty, these apricots were really ripe when I finally got around to doing the racking. Just a few minutes in the room and you knew there was apricots around. They were starting to turn into mush when I racked the beer off.

I vented the ozone, and the rinse was to prevent oxidation in case some amount remained. The main reason for the ozone was the whole "Organic" thing, at the time I was using water I drove an hour to get fresh from an underground spring, and used organic wheat extract with homegrown spray-free Hallertau hops, it was a labour of love I guess. Not a huge fan of fruit beers, so the main reason to brew it was for friends and family on the organic bandwagon.

A quick rinse with sanitizer/rubbing alcohol is all that is needed. The ozone is not really doing anything.

I made a habanero pepper beer for which I grabbed habaneros with my bare hands, placed them on my kitchen cutting board and chopped them with a knife from my knife block without sanitizing it. Then I put them in a hop bag and placed them into my beer that was still in the primary fermentation chamber but had reached final gravity.

Oh, but I did sanitize the hop bag by soaking it in StarSan before putting the peppers in the bag.

Tasted great and not a hint of infection.

I think there is too much worry about contamination once the beer has fermented.