Fruit Beer Strawberry Alarm Clock v3.0 (Strawberry Blonde)

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has anyone tried doing this recipe using strawberry flavoring instead of real strawberries? Is the flavor the same? how much would you need would 4oz be enough?
 
has anyone tried doing this recipe using strawberry flavoring instead of real strawberries? Is the flavor the same? how much would you need would 4oz be enough?

IMO, flavorings are usually pretty strong so 4 oz would definitely be enough, but with all flavor in general, it comes to personal taste. That's also a key to having a bottle of flavoring - you can add to taste :)

That said, I do not believe that the flavor will be the same. Flavorings rarely are - again, that's my opinion.

I have heard that Wicked Pete's Strawberry Blonde is made with flavoring so you might get more of that sweeter flavor vs the tartness from the real berries.

In either case, I'm pretty sure I'd drink your beer. :mug:
 
has anyone tried doing this recipe using strawberry flavoring instead of real strawberries? Is the flavor the same? how much would you need would 4oz be enough?

I have only done this recipe with real frozen strawberries so I can't compare. However, using the real fruit made for a delicious beer! What makes you apprehensive about using real fruit? I think that you could even try using less fruit and still have a delicious strawberry beer. IMO the 4lbs is really pushing the fruit flavor into an almost wine-cooler taste. But my wife (and her friends) love it and it is a refreshing beer on a hot day. Good luck!
 
I was thinking it would be easier and probaly alot cheaper to just get some strawberry flavoring of some kind. If I go that route Ill probaly add it at bottling. How much should I add? I was going to do 4oz for a 5gal batch. is that too much?
 
Well it is certainly easier, although I don't know about cheaper. I usually make this when strawberries are in season and selling for dirt cheap. I think the most I've paid for the 4lbs of strawberries I've needed for this beer is around $6, and usually it is $4 or less.

Those little bottles of flavoring/extract are not particularly cheap.


I personally don't use the extract, *especially* the strawberry extract, because it has a peculiar flavor to it that tastes wholly artificial to me. You can taste it in e.g. Pete's Wicked Strawberry Blonde. That is why I came up with this recipe in the first place. However, my tastes are not the same as everyone else's, so if you want to do flavoring additions go for it. As to how much...my advice is to pull yourself maybe a 12 oz sample (be sure to measure the amount carefully...use a measuring glass to hold your sample) from the primary and try adding extract to it with a dropper for which you know the amount in each drop. Then you can slowly add drops, mix, and taste it until you get to the level of strawberry flavoring you like. Count how many drops you added, and figure out the ratio you need for the full batch.
 
madkap, If you go to discount grocery stores you can usually get frozen strawberries for $2/lb in the Twin Cities. It really is not that difficult with frozen fruit. All you do is soak a large nylon mesh bag in starsan, dump in the fruit (make sure the bag does not touch unsterilized surfaces), knot the bag, and then put the bag in the primary. I've used this method twice without infection. The results certainly speak for themselves.

I would again urge you to bite the bullet and spend the extra couple bucks to get real fruit. Try it with only 3 lbs if you need to save a little. I agree with weirdboy about the fakeness flavor of strawberry extract. I did this with real fruit and the beer tasted and smelled like strawberry preserves my grandma use to make.

What ever you decide to do make sure you post your results to let others learn from your experience.
 
Has anyone tried Dogfish Head TweasonAle and compared it to this brew? I want to brew a gluten free version of this. Has anyone tried back sweetening it?
 
I had never heard of Tweason'Ale before, but looking at their page for it, my guess is that it tastes completely different. I will see if I can find a bottle around here and try some to get an idea of what that beer is actually like, because it's quite difficult to gauge just from reading a paragraph.

I have been meaning to brew a gluten-free beer just to try it out, but to be honest, I don't think I've ever even had a gluten free beer and I don't know which ones are worth drinking. I don't have any friends who suffer from celiac (at least, that I know of) so it's not like I am motivated to design gluten-free recipes. That being said, I have heard some interesting things about this stuff called Clarity Ferm, which is a fining agent that supposedly removes glutens from beer in addition to clarifying it.

Here is a thread here on HBT about it:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/has-anyone-tried-clarity-ferm-brewers-clarex-white-labs-175574/

And here's a short article which talks about Widmer's use of Clarex/Clarity Ferm in their brewing process for GF beers:
http://www.katu.com/news/business/Craft-Brew-Alliance-shares-gluten-free-beer-secrets-150193935.html
 
I have some clarity ferm and am going to try it with an extract honey cream ale kit. I was diagnosed with celiac disease 2 years ago. Drinking a sorghum pale ale homebrew right now.

I'm going to make a basic sorghum brew and secondary it onto strawberries and see how it goes. I'll probably end up adding honey before kegging, I like this TweasonAle, it's very sweet.
 
I made a batch of this a few weeks ago to serve at a party he first week in may. It is currently in the secondary on the strawberries where it will sit at least another week or two.

One question, has anyone added some strawberries to the keg for additional flavor? I will be serving this from the keg at the party so it would be easy to drop a few lbs of strawberries into the keg.

Thanks

Alex
 
Just brewed this about 24 hrs ago. The fermentation is putting off a pretty foul/sweet odor, anyone know if this is normal?
 
Notes on how long to let this sit on the berries:

I've made this recipe three times. I just racked the latest batch into a keg last night. Each time through I've played with the time the beer spends sitting on strawberries. My method for adding the berries is to put 4 pounds of whole, frozen berries from Aldi (econo grocery store) into a sanitized nylon bag, dunk the whole thing in starsan a couple times, and gently lower the bag into my primary bucket ( I do not secondary.) The bucket stays in the high 60s the entire time.

I've noticed slight differences in the final strawberry flavor/aroma in the finished product depending on the time the berries were in the beer. I've done 2 weeks, 3 weeks, and 4 weeks. Each time the beer turns out fantastic. It is a crowd favorite for sure. However, it seems like the longer time on the berries pushes the flavor toward strawberry preserves. The shorter time leaves a fresher berry flavor/aroma. Anyone else notice a difference? Just thought I'd share.
 
That sounds like a heat x time issue to me. I bet if you had the strawberries on the beer at 35 degrees instead of high 60's you'd get a fresher flavor. I definitely get more of a "preserve" flavor if I pasteurize the strawberries before using them.
 
I recently made a 10 gallon batch of this (third time) and I'm about ready to add the strawberries to the fermenter. I've been reading up on the use of gelatin to clear up the beer. I had a crazy thought to use a strawberry jello mix on this one. It could add more strawberry flavor or it could royally screw it up. Anyone ever try something like that?
Thoughts?
 
My only thought is that it will probably kick off a bit of fermentation again, since jello has sugar in it. I tried to find out how much sugar is in it by looking at nutrition info online, and the only reference I could find said it's 80 calories in a 3oz packet, which would mean ~20 grams of sugar which is .7 oz...probably not enough to worry about, but I wouldn't want to do it if your plan is to bottle immediately afterwards, as it would probably screw up your priming sugar calculations. If you are kegging then I don't see why not.
 
Sincere appreciation goes out to Wierdboy for this recipe. Second year I've done it. Went so fast last year that I made a double batch this this time around. This time I pitched 5gal with S-04 and the other 5gal with Notty's to do a side by side yeast comparison. My only tweak has been to add a small amount of lactose to the boil to balance the strawberry tartness.

Cold crash question- I recently picked up a chest freezer and am using it for this batch before my inaugural lager. After 3 days @ 35F w/ gelatin, the beer was absolutely crystal clear at bottling. I've never seen my beer clear up like that before. Should I have any concern about there being enough yeast still in solution to bottle condition?
 
Crystal clear at at bottling? Business as usual IMO. That is how it's supposed to look! I would not worry about the yeast. Unless you've been lagering it for a few months you'll still get plenty of activity soon after you add some sugar to carbonate.

FYI I did this beer once fermented with a lager yeast, and it turned out pretty clean and tasty. I want to say on that one I did a split-batch and side-by-side fermented with S-04 and a lager yeast. The ale yeast might have been US-05, though.
 
Also did he warm up his mash tun prior to mashing or just put grains and water in, w/o? thanks again!
cheers Smon
 
how did he sparge?
batch or fly/continuous?
im about to warm up my mash water ( is that strike water?)
so reply sooner than later will be appreciated
 
The answers to these questions aren't really germane to the recipe. I have made this beer using several different mash and sparge techniques over the years, and I am pretty sure if you ask 10 people who have made this recipe how they did their mash, you'll get at least 5 different answers. It just depends on your equipment and process.
 
Yea that's what I figured I continuous sparged after boil I came out with roughly 4.5 g water. With a og of 1.055 . Looks and smells great .the yeast is going nuts, I have it in a 6g glad carboy it looks like there is a tornado going.in there lots of movement
 
Just fired up a batch of this on Saturday. My only mod was that I used some harvested 1056 that I had in my fridge. With the exception of learning that chilling with warmer summer tap water takes a little longer, everything went fine. Original gravity was 1.051 -- just .001 off the original recipe. Yeast has been doing its thing for three days now.

One question -- I do not have a plastic bucket fermenter. My plan is to just drop the berries directly into my glass secondary. Getting them in will be easy -- but getting them out will be the tricky part. I plan to quarter the strawberries to ease this process. Has anyone ever sliced up their berries a little smaller to get them out of a glass carbory?

Thanks,

Kevin
 
Magical idea just came to me. Since this beer accents the tart aspects of strawberries more than the sweet, I bet this beer would be amazing after some miracle berries.

If you have never tried them, they come in pill form that you dissolve on your tongue and it binds to your taste buds making tart things taste sweet. So you can bite into a raw lemon, and it will taste like lemonade. I've eat strawberries before with them and they are the most delicious things you will ever try. Think I have a few pills left, going to give it a whirl once this beer is done.

And for those interested, it's really cool to taste all sorts of things:
http://www.miracleberrypill.org/
 
made an extract version and added 8 oz Honey Malt. used hand-picked ripe berries which were processed as listed. fantastic brew, intense aroma. took 3rd in fruit beers at the 2013 SNERHC. thanks for the recipe, will definitely brew another batch next summer!
 
It may be somewhere in the posts already, and I apologize if it is, but am I correct when I say you mash at 152 for 65 minutes, then raise the temp. to 168 for the final 10 minutes? Thanks in advance!


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I brewed this a few weeks ago, and after adding the strawberries, the beer hasn't tasted tart at all. Comint out of the secondary, it's definitely got a berry taste to it, but it's been more of a old strawberry flavor, which is kind of a bummer. Hopefully the carbonation from the bottles will spruce it up a bit.

I'll post back later with my results in case anyone has a similar experience.


Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
 
Mine has been fermenting about 24 hours now. OG was at 1.052 and I'll continue to update. Fermenting well, this one requires a blow off tube.


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Thinking of starting this brew this weekend. Really only want to rack half of the primary onto strawberries and bottle the other half as is. Do you think it will be ready for bottling after only 1 week in primary fermentation?
 
Hey, everyone, thought I'd post a post-mortem, given that it's been a good while.

The beer wound up very good, especially with some citric acid added to make it good and sharp. The process of extracting the cherries in vodka did dull the taste a bit.

Only issue is that the ABV is entirely out of whack. Original K-Rouge is 8% ABV, and this one wound up being north of 14%. I used 4 gals of base beer at 8% ABV + 1 gallon (!) of cherry liqueur at 40%-ish ABV = ((4 * 0.08) + (1 * 0.40))/5 = 14.4% ABV, which is way too high, but still damn tasty. :)

The liqueur is also good on its own (I had about a liter left over). It's very obviously natural cherry, nothing chemical or synthetic to it. It has a pretty heavy alcohol heat, though, which I'm glad was moderated by mixing with the beer.

If I make it again (and I may not; it's a lot of money to buy all those cherries and vodka, and has to be kegged instead of bottled to avoid bottle bombs, so it takes up a keg), I would experiment with a long steep of just the cherries in secondary, but I don't have any idea how it would work out. Someone mentioned kirschwasser in the thread; I honestly don't know how well it would work.

My wife, friends and I are about 2/3 of the way through the keg at this stage (it's not a guzzling beer at 14%, whew), so be ready for it to last and last if you try it.

Some other things i might try:

* Scaling the base beer down to 5 percent, and the liqueur to 20%. That would yield an 8% final beer at a 4:1 ratio, but I have no idea how that would affect the body, flavor, etc. of the result. The base would no longer be a Donker clone, that's for certain.

* Different cherries. The ones I used were Walmart bagged frozen. Some sharper variety, or fresher one, might have gotten me closer without needing the citric acid.

If anyone else tries the recipe, post about it!

-Rich
 
Racked onto the berries yesterday. Came out at 5.2 ABV. Sample tasted... plain. Now for 3 weeks on the berries.


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Posting back with some results. Uncarbonated, the beer didn't taste tart at all. After carbonation, the beer was extremely tart (much too tart for the taste of my friends and I). Aroma still smelled like old strawberries. I'll let it rest in a closet for 6 months or so and periodically test it to see how it mellows.

Another interesting note is how the beer didn't settle very well in the bottles. The yeast made a compact cake on the bottom as usual, but there was a lot of material left floating along the walls of the bottle. ImageUploadedByHome Brew1395920202.550014.jpg

I think it's residual pieces of strawberry, and it settled onto the bottom after I stuck it in the fridge overnight. However, as soon as I popped the cap, the pieces came up in chunks with the CO2. It totally grossed out a guy who was trying my beer with me. I let it clarify for a few minutes before pouring, and it still came out a little chunky.

All in all, I'd consider this beer a good learning experience, but not something I'll try again. Oh well, I still made beer. Can't complain about that.


Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
 
You didn't post any details about your process, but that is why I put the strawberries inside a sealed fine mesh bag in a bucket for secondary, and then rack onto them.

At this point the beer is in the bottles already, so you aren't really going to be able to mess with it, but another strategy you can use, which is somewhat effective in my experience, is putting a filter on the output end of your tubing when racking from secondary to your bottling bucket. However, the best strategy is to not let all the little bits of strawberry get into the beer to begin with.
 
Yeah, I put all my strawberries (frozen and halved) in a mesh bag into my secondary, and I didn't notice any of the floaters. I think the particles that gave it a cloudy appearance congealed and fell out of suspension.

Had I used gelatin finings to clarify my beer, I imagine this would have mitigated this cosmetic issue.


Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
 

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