Brewhause
Member
Hello, I am looking for some insight on how to proceed with a kriek beer that I have going right now.
Alright so we made a beerkit (New Zealand brand i believe?) wheat beer. Transferred it into our carboy after a week or so and at that time, we added around 9lbs. of whole fresh cherries (removed stems).
It has been 4 weeks in the secondary now. Bubbling has slowed to a crawl (still a little activity) so we thought we should bottle it. We took a gravity reading, and it seemed to show only 1005.. We thought that was strange, so we gave it a taste. It was very red in colour, but it tasted very watery. You could get a hint of cherry, but it was not nearly what you would expect from 9lbs. of fruit. It did not taste bad by any means, so we ruled out an infection. It seemed to have a little bit of carbonation already. We attributed that to the sugars in the cherries.
I guess the question is; what can we do to "fix" it? We opted to leave it in the secondary in hopes that a longer time exposed to the cherries would result in more flavor. We contemplated adding sugar to the brew to liven things up a bit, but did not follow through with that idea. We also thought maybe we should mash up the cherries a bit to have more surface area and possibly release some of the flavors. This would prove difficult due to the size of the carboy's mouth opening (we also realized getting the cherries out will be somewhat difficult, hahaha).
TL;DR - Kriek beer tastes like nothing after 4 weeks in secondary. Why? How can we get more flavor out of this beer?
Alright so we made a beerkit (New Zealand brand i believe?) wheat beer. Transferred it into our carboy after a week or so and at that time, we added around 9lbs. of whole fresh cherries (removed stems).
It has been 4 weeks in the secondary now. Bubbling has slowed to a crawl (still a little activity) so we thought we should bottle it. We took a gravity reading, and it seemed to show only 1005.. We thought that was strange, so we gave it a taste. It was very red in colour, but it tasted very watery. You could get a hint of cherry, but it was not nearly what you would expect from 9lbs. of fruit. It did not taste bad by any means, so we ruled out an infection. It seemed to have a little bit of carbonation already. We attributed that to the sugars in the cherries.
I guess the question is; what can we do to "fix" it? We opted to leave it in the secondary in hopes that a longer time exposed to the cherries would result in more flavor. We contemplated adding sugar to the brew to liven things up a bit, but did not follow through with that idea. We also thought maybe we should mash up the cherries a bit to have more surface area and possibly release some of the flavors. This would prove difficult due to the size of the carboy's mouth opening (we also realized getting the cherries out will be somewhat difficult, hahaha).
TL;DR - Kriek beer tastes like nothing after 4 weeks in secondary. Why? How can we get more flavor out of this beer?