Preparing Raspberries

Ive just put them in the freezer, what's the best way of dealing with them next? Sweeze them through a muslin bag? Blend and boil them, stick them in whole?
Thanks in advance!

I let them thaw then mush them up in the bag, it keeps my hands a bit cleaner. I didn't use a muslin bag this year on my blackberry wine and I wish I had. Just leave the bag in there for the first few days it seems to make the wine pick up more color and flavor.

Ah, so you recon crush them and suspend them in the bag rather than juicing them? I have more berries than I need so I could do a bit of both?

Insomniac said:

Ah, so you recon crush them and suspend them in the bag rather than juicing them? I have more berries than I need so I could do a bit of both?

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No, you can either just put them in straight and they usually fall apart during the fermentation, especially if you aerate daily to the 1/3rd sugar break.

Or the freeze/thaw method and the only reason to put them into a straining bag of some sort is to keep the lees/debris down in the ferment. Of course you can squish them some once they're in the bag, but as above.

What you shouldn't do for any seeded fruit (as a rule) is to blend/blitz it. As that can free up some off flavours from the broken seeds - more often than not, some bitterness.

Oh, and don't use raspberries alone, they tend to produce a flavour that will dominate the batch.....

Cheers fb, I'm not worried about them dominating as that was the idea! I'm a little worried about just putting them in though as its a lot of raspberrys and it will take up a lot of the carboy! I'm trying to make a fizzy raspberry drink this time round rather than a mead with a bit of raspberry.

Insomniac said:

Cheers fb, I'm not worried about them dominating as that was the idea! I'm a little worried about just putting them in though as its a lot of raspberrys and it will take up a lot of the carboy! I'm trying to make a fizzy raspberry drink this time round rather than a mead with a bit of raspberry.

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Well if you've enough raspberries, then make it in a bucket, not in a carboy/demi-john. I mean, putting rasps in a DJ isn't so bad but it might be a pain to get them out again........

Not if you cover the end of your auto siphon with a muslin bag. Works for me!

I don't have a bucket maybe I should just make it stronger than wanted and top up with water in secondary and hope it comes out about where I wanted?
What I had in mind was juicing as many as my recipe says to get the expected OG and discarding the pulp, and then adding a smaller amount in the secondary to add back in any flavour. Would that work ok?

Here is what I did after preping them.

Let thaw, run through a blender mix in some pectin enzyme while blending. Then let sit for 1 hr, run this through a metal screen with a rubber spatula to get the seeds out. The seeds were bigger than the screen.

Then I hit it up with the blender again and put in a large nylon bag with plenty of room, in a brewing bucket. Seriously the nylon bag was as big as the bucket even when tied. All of it went into the must.

I waited like a month then brought out the nylon bag suspended over the must and drained it by twisting the bag and putting pressure on the pulp.

In the end I did end up with a lot of wastage due to pulp, you just expect it. I also needed to backsweeten because MAN do the yeasties love raspberries. It fermented way dry.

Insomniac said:

I don't have a bucket maybe I should just make it stronger than wanted and top up with water in secondary and hope it comes out about where I wanted?
What I had in mind was juicing as many as my recipe says to get the expected OG and discarding the pulp, and then adding a smaller amount in the secondary to add back in any flavour. Would that work ok?

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If you freeze/thaw anyway, then just squish them up by hand once thawed then mix it with some water and add the pectolase for a day or two before progressing the ferment (you can sulphite it at the same time).

Then it will pour into the DJ. Ferment it down to, say, 1.020 and then rack it off the pulp/seeds through a straining cloth of some sort and let it finish.

If you wanted to juice them, it would be unwise to blitz them with a blender/liquidiser as you could get the same issue with the shattered seeds etc. So either see if you can beg/borrow/steal a steam juicer from somewhere and use that, or simmer at a ratio of something like 2lb of fruit to 1 pint of water, until the fruit is all broken down, then let it cool, add the pectolase (which helps with flavour/colour extraction as well as dealing with any pectin generated), then after a day or two, strain the juice from the pulp and incorporate it into a batch that way.

Cool, think I might go the simmer route, sounds like I would get the most drink out of it at the end! Cheers guys ill let you know how it goes!

Insomniac said:

Cool, think I might go the simmer route, sounds like I would get the most drink out of it at the end! Cheers guys ill let you know how it goes!

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The same applies to pretty much all "red/black" fruit i.e. it enriches (or seems to) the fruit flavour. Whereas, with white/green fruit (apples, kiwi fruit, etc) you don't want to be heating them otherwise you end up with a "cooked" taste to the fruit.