I'm making my first Cranberry Wheat, got a Q

Hey guys,

So I'm making my second batch of homebrew ever. First was a pumpkin spice porter that went very well. Now I'm adventuring into something else. I'm currently fermenting a Wheat beer which should be done tomorrow or the next day.
I'm planning on racking it into a secondary fermenter. I've seen people implement the cranberries in different manners and I'd like to know what has worked for you? Do you use whole cranberries and steep/add sugar? Or did you use some type of cranberry in syrup mix? Any suggestions would be welcome...

What I'm going for will be a slight cranberry coloring and a semi sweet cranberry flavor.


Thanks
First time poster

Welcome to HBT!

I've never made a cranberry beer, but one thing I would NOT do is add sugar. It's not going to make the beer sweeter, but instead drier. If it were me, I would probably take 2 pounds of cranberries (guessing), freeze them to break down the cell walls, heat them up for a few minutes to kill any bacteria, then add them to the fermenter. Hope it goes well for you. Cheers!

I'm not sure you'd want to use whole cranberries. Have you ever eaten a whole cranberry? That crazy tart flavor is what you are going to get in your beer if you just add whole cranberries.

The flavor most people know as "Cranberry" is cranberry and a crazy amount of sugar, but any sugars you add to your wort is just going to ferment out, unless you do some pretty advanced cold crashing, backsweetening, or pastuerization.

I would probably use a cranberry extract instead of whole cranberries, or at least think about using an artificial sweetener with the whole cranberries (depending on if artificial sweeteners taste like crap to you).

Here's a good cranberry extract:

http://www.austinhomebrew.com/product_info.php?cPath=178_21_74&products_id=489

If it ends up being too tart for your liking, another option is to add some lactose rather than artificial sweetener.