Adding canned fruit to beer

I am making a wheat beer and I want to add canned peaches to it. I cannot however find oregon or any other pie filling or the like which I have heard is best for fruit into beer. I read that you need to be careful about putting fruit in that has preservatives in it but a lot of the cans I cannot see that they even say preseravtives or preservative free. Can I put in the store brand kind of peaches in their sugar syrup and will it be ok? Or are there ones that I should just stay away from?
Thanks

Might I suggest that you use bagged and frozen fruit? Around here I can find them with preservatives and just rack onto the fruit.

In terms of canned fruit, look at the list of ingredients - the preservatives should be listed. They can mess up your yeast - I have no direct experience with this, but it only stands to reason.

Pie filling? Not sure what would be in that so I'd really hesitate here.

B

you can use fruit with preservatives, its just not going to ferment and you cannot bottle if that the case. If you looking for as much real fruit flavor as possible adding fresh fruit/juice and not allowing it to ferment is the way to go. I once added 3 lbs of frozen strawberries to 5 gal belgian pale ale in keg and kept it cool to avoid sugars in fruit to ferment. Zero tartness and really pleasant fruit flavor and aroma!

I think most or all of those will have preservatives in it. Sometimes they add just ascorbic acid or citric acid (both acids found in citrus fruits) to lower the pH below where most bacteria will cause spoilage but with that much sugar added in the syrup you're highly likely to find preservatives. Anything with sodium is probably a preservative.

If you can't find fresh fruit then frozen fruit is usually your best bet.

For frozen fruit, do you have to sanitize it in any way? With vodka or anything like that? I wouldn't think frozen fruit would give THAT much flavor but I have never tried either so...
Paraordnance, that sounds really good! Might have to try that sometime, I love strawberries!

Matteo57 said:

For frozen fruit, do you have to sanitize it in any way? With vodka or anything like that? I wouldn't think frozen fruit would give THAT much flavor but I have never tried either so...
Paraordnance, that sounds really good! Might have to try that sometime, I love strawberries!

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I did not sanitize frozen strawberries. I washed them, quartered and frozed them in ziplock bags, than later added straight to keg in sanitized knee-high. Frozen fruit gives you all flavor there is, in fact it gives more than fresh fruit because during freezing cellular structure is brocken down and more juices will be released to beer.

My first batch, I did a hefeweizen and racked onto 5 pounds of fozen peaches. To prep the peaches, I just took them out of the bag and stuck them in the oven to de-thaw + a little more. Came out great. It was a light peach flavor. If you are looking for something stronger, you may want to look at extract at bottling time.