How much gravity will pawpaws add?

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Reddy

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Every year in August I go to this huge music festival in the mountains in Southern West Virginia. I also usually brew up something special to share with friends I meet there.

Seeing as how pawpaws are known as the West Virginia banana, and seeing as how a wheat beer would be refreshing on a hot August day, I'm brewing up a pawpaw wheat beer. My plan is to let the 7 gallons of wheat beer I brewed today sit for a week or so and then rack it onto 7lbs of pawpaw pulp that I have in the freezer.

My question is, does anyone know how much sugar the pawpaws will add, and how much that will raise the ABV by? My OG was 1.045, and I'm planning on it ending around 1.012 for an ABV of 4.5% or so, without accounting for the pawpaws.

Anyone got a guess?
 
Not sure. You could take it down to your LHBS and see if they can get a reading on a refractometer to get your starting SG of the fruit.
 
Got an email from a guy that I think would know what he's talking about...

He says to be safe, assume that the pawpaws will add the same amount of fermentables per pound as grain because more or less, they do. I'm pumped because that means my final ABV will be up around 7%. It's like adding to my grain bill by a third!
 
That sounds a bit off, as 100 gms of pawpaw has less than 80 calories and about 3/4s of that is sugar.
 
I have never thought of pawpaws as being that sweet but 7 lbs. sounds like a big amount of pawpaw flavor for a wheat beer. I would love to know how it turns out. The livestrong website of all places says 1 fruit of pawpaw has 18.8 g of carbohydrates. Not sure how to convert that into fermentable sugar though?

http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/nutrition-calories/food/generic/paw-paw-fruit/

"Seeing as how pawpaws are known as the West Virginia banana" I always heard them referred to as the "Indiani Banani"
 
When I use fruit in beer, I usually just do searches for nutritional information. If you can find the amount of sugar by weight then use that value. If not, then the quantity of carbohydrate is nearly good. For most ripe fruit almost all of the carbohydrate will be fermentable sugars.

I found a couple of sites that list pawpaws as having 8-10g of sugar/100g of fruit. This works out to roughly 1.5oz of sugar per lb of pawpaw, 10.5oz of sugar total.

In a 20L batch you'll be adding about 6 points to your OG for a total of 1.051 .
Since fruit sugars are usually 100% fermentable, your FG shouldn't change by very much because of the fruit addition.
 
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