Adding Blueberries to fermenter

I just wanted to update everyone.

My personal methodology is to throw some berries in a blender, and blend them with some vodka (preferably vodka in that fruit's flavor). This has seemed to work for me as far as killing bacteria.

I put them in the secondary for ~2 weeks to ensure they fulle impart their flavor, then add a slight amount of extract to ensure the flavor comes through.

Any updates from those that have been experimenting with blueberries? I made a 5G batch of wheat and am going to split a gallon off to add blueberries and a gallon to add cherries or rasberries?

Just stumbled on this thread and have done some brews with blueberries before. Just one guy's method...

I juice about 1lb per gallon. Throw that in a pot at about 160-170 for 20 min. Cool it and dump it into the fermenter. Works great for me. FWIW.

Useless sidebar, take the pulp from the blueberries and save it for smoothies or throw into some muffins.

sfrisby said:

Just stumbled on this thread and have done some brews with blueberries before. Just one guy's method...

I juice about 1lb per gallon. Throw that in a pot at about 160-170 for 20 min. Cool it and dump it into the fermenter. Works great for me. FWIW.

Useless sidebar, take the pulp from the blueberries and save it for smoothies or throw into some muffins.

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Yeah, I'll try that next time. My blueberry pale ale didn't exactly pan out like i'd planned.

It grew a pellicle w/in weeks, so I spent the next few months throwing dregs from my favorite lambics/sours onto it. Then I blended it with a tripel I brewed. Turned out a year later to be a wonderful blueberry sour. However, wasn't exactly the clean blueberry ale I was going for. Here're a few pics...

I did a batch with Cherries once and it was terrible... I'm liking the post that said puree the berries with vodka and add in secondary. May I'll have to give that a shot next time. All the extracts I've ever tried have seemed to have a strange taste to them.

I do a strawberry blonde and rack from the primary directly on to the 6lbs frozen whole strawberries from Dole. It turns out AMAZING. If I did anything with blueberries, I would follow that same logic...rack on to frozen.

Brewnoob1 said:

I do a strawberry blonde and rack from the primary directly on to the 6lbs frozen whole strawberries from Dole. It turns out AMAZING. If I did anything with blueberries, I would follow that same logic...rack on to frozen.

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I do a strawberry wheat that I use fresh locally grown strawberries to brew it every spring. I cut and freeze 4 lbs of berries while my brew is in primary. Once the primary ferm is done, I then thaw the berries and heat them in a saucepan to 120 degrees to kill any nasties that might be lingering. Doing this also breaks down the berries bringing out more flavor from the berries. I then cool the berries and add them to my brew like a dry hop.

This wheat beer turned out to be one of my most popular brews among my friends and was by far my wife's favorite and I'm already planning on brewing about 2-3 batches come spring!

I ended up taking a 3lb bag of dole frozen blueberries, adding blueberry vodka and chopping them up in a blender, and adding it to the secondary. It turned out very well.

Tip: sanitize the tray of a coffee maker and user that to filter the result when transferring to the bottling bucket