Cherries in the Snow ?

Has anyone tried the "Cherries in the Snow" recipe from the Complete joy of Homebrewing book?

My question is if you did the recipe did you use the sour cherries it requested or just any cherries you could get. I could only get sweet cherries and I tasted it when I racked it into secondary last night and it did not seem to have a lot of cherry flavor or much taste to brag about at all. I realize that this beer is supposed to get better with age so is that why it is so bland?

Thanks

I've never made the recipe, but am curious how you processed the cherries?

rdwj said:

I've never made the recipe, but am curious how you processed the cherries?

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De-stemmed and de-pitted by hand 10lbs of cherries lot of time, not much fun, think hack and slash horror film, stained a good shirt with cherry juice.

Then placed cherries in sanitized bowl and crushed with a potato masher to get juice, put cherries in grain bags which went into boiling wort with juice, this lowered temp to 165 roughly and sat for 15 mins to pastuerize.

I've always heard that you shouldn't add fruit to the boil; it's supposed to added to the secondary. Did the recipe call for that procedure? I've made a couple of cherry beers and the flavor is pretty strong using one pound per gallon.

Hopefully it improves with age, but from my limited experience with fruit, I think it tends to mellow.

rdwj said:

I've always heard that you shouldn't add fruit to the boil; it's supposed to added to the secondary. Did the recipe call for that procedure? I've made a couple of cherry beers and the flavor is pretty strong using one pound per gallon.

Hopefully it improves with age, but from my limited experience with fruit, I think it tends to mellow.

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Yes the recipe called for adding it to the boil, and this is 10lbs of cherries with hops and LME, you would think this would have huge cherry flavor. Yeah I was under the impression that aging would just mellow it out too, not make it more flavorful, so I am assuming that there just must be a big difference in using sweet cherries instead of sour. The cherries were definately ripe and good and he states this recipe is one of most people favorites in his book.


BTW I thought you just weren't supposed to boil the fruit mainly because of the haziness it would create in the beer? What is your process and how are you processing your cherries. I would think by adding to the secondary you would run a huge risk of infection but I am still new to homebrewing.

The last batch of cherry wheat I made, I used campden tablets to kill anything funky. The tile before that, I headed my slurry to about 145 (I think). All things considered, when adding to the secondary, you don't have to be AS careful because there is alcohol present in the beer that will kill most of what you would normally worry about.

That is a good idea I hadn't thought about using campden with beer. But, I am hoping that I can figure out what is making the beer so bland as the only two things I did not follow out of the recipe were using sweet instead of sour cherries and the recipe did not call for removing pits, but I would think that leaving them in would just make it bitter.

It is hard for me to believe it is bland with as red as the beer is.

Thanks for your help and replies btw.

I take it not many people have tried this recipe

I tried a similar recipe...couldn't get enough cherries, so I used a combination of sour cherries and cranberries. Turned out to be very yummy, but I don't know about using sweet cherries...

If the flavor isn't enough for you, why not add a bit more to secondary? Would up the ABV a little, but that's not necessarily a bad thing

Not that I've made this or much of anything as I am a new brewer just getting ready to bottle my first batch, but...

Good call on the pits. They don't always make things bitter but have the ability to make things very bitter, not in a good hops way either. I thing a lot of things come into play on the degre of bitterness pits give to brew, juice, jellies etc. ph seems like it would be a factor as well as the growing season of the cherries. Dry growing seasons seems to bring out the bitterness of everything.

By putting the cherries into the boil instead of racking onto them in the secondary you probably boiled away some/lots of the oils and compounds that would given you more cherry taste. Think about how hops at 60 only gives you the bitter but the same hops at flame out give you the aroma and flavor. Though different it is more like dry hopping if you rack onto the cherries. The alcohol can collect the oils which is where the flavors come from. while the yeast eats up all the fermentable sugar, but in the boil the much of oils are broke down and evaporate leaving you wondering where your ten pounds of cherries went.

Robar said:

Not that I've made this or much of anything as I am a new brewer just getting ready to bottle my first batch, but...

Good call on the pits. They don't always make things bitter but have the ability to make things very bitter, not in a good hops way either. I thing a lot of things come into play on the degre of bitterness pits give to brew, juice, jellies etc. ph seems like it would be a factor as well as the growing season of the cherries. Dry growing seasons seems to bring out the bitterness of everything.

By putting the cherries into the boil instead of racking onto them in the secondary you probably boiled away some/lots of the oils and compounds that would given you more cherry taste. Think about how hops at 60 only gives you the bitter but the same hops at flame out give you the aroma and flavor. Though different it is more like dry hopping if you rack onto the cherries. The alcohol can collect the oils which is where the flavors come from. while the yeast eats up all the fermentable sugar, but in the boil the much of oils are broke down and evaporate leaving you wondering where your ten pounds of cherries went.

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I don't think much flavor would be boiled away because the temperature drops in less than 5 seconds and it is what the recipe called for, also the author makes it out like this was one of his most favored recipes. I wish I could find someone who has tried it with both sweet and sour cherries in different batches. Thank you for your input.

seefresh said:

If the flavor isn't enough for you, why not add a bit more to secondary? Would up the ABV a little, but that's not necessarily a bad thing

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Not a bad idea, thank you

I made a low alcohol wit with a couple pounds of pitted frozen sweet cherries at the end of the boil(5min) and the taste out of the primary was pretty thin and had almost no cherry flavor. I added a half pound to secondary and it was quite a remarkable difference. I think most of the flavor and aroma compounds are driven off during the first vigorous days of fermentation, especially if there's a huge krausen and you're using a blowoff tube. Pretty much all the sugars in the sweet cherries are fermentable, but I don't know much about sour cherries. Sorry. I would think the tartness in the sour ones would also accentuate the "cherry" flavor so maybe there would still be a noticable flavor/aroma even after vigorous fermentation.

I haven't made 'Cherries in the Snow' but I have made the 'Cherry Fever Stout' from The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing (its on the page right after 'Cherries in the Snow' coincidentally). To answer your first question, the recipe called for either 5lbs of choke cherries or sour cherries if choke cherries were not available. I couldn't find either so I used bing cherries. It turned out fine, in fact, it's one of my favourite homebrews.

Regarding the lack of cherry taste, my recipe called for basically the same procedure as yours except for the stout it specifically says not to pit the cherries, so I didn't. I added the cherries to the boiling wort then turned off the heat so I didn't boil the cherries. When I poured the wort into the primary, I left the cherries in, as the recipe called for. When I racked to the secondary, the cherries had all turned grey, so it looked kind of disgusting, so I didn't taste the brew at that point. (Edit to clarify: the cherries did not get racked to the secondary.) After a couple of weeks in the secondary, and a couple in the bottle, there was a noticeable cherry flavour. My friends who were expecting 'Guinness' because it was a stout were pleasantly surprised.

Did you leave the cherries in for the primary fermentation? I'd have to guess that 10lbs of cherries in a 5 gallon brew would give it quite a bit of flavour. Adding extract to the secondary sounds like a good suggestion if you're not happy with the amount of cherry flavour.

Good luck with the beer.

Bob

Thanks to everyone who replied. I left the cherries in a grain bag during primary and took them out when I racked into carboy. I tried tasting the beer again right before bottling and it does have a cherry flavor, I just think that it lacks the tartness of the sour cherries like you said. Still waiting for the bottles to complete carbonation for a taste of the finished beer.

I brewed up a batch of this back in December. I kinda cheated I used 12 each 15.5 oz cans of Kroger brand tart cherries in water. Mashed them with a potato masher and threw them in to steep as soon as i turned the burner off during the boil.

So today I got around to opening a bottle. Lots of sour cherry flavor and I can see why he said it's appropriate to serve with ice. I'll save most of this batch for warmer days for sure, but I'm glad I brewed it.