Raisins for carbonation?

I was reading through some of the recipes in Brooklyn Brew Shop's book for some inspiration on my next brew. I came across a recipe called "Prohibition Ale" and it called for raisins to be put in each bottle. Apparently a woman told the good people at Brooklyn Brew Shop that she use to brew beer back during the Prohibition era and that you needed to use exactly 4 Raisin because 3 would be too little and 5 would result in a bottle bombs.

I doubt I will be using this method, but I was wondering if anyone had tried this and if so what were the results.

subscribed... interested in this...Wonder how many for belgian beers... I would think this would be good for a good quad or something!

You would get sugar to carbonate, but I would be afraid of putting a bunch of nasties in your beer and winding up with bottle bombs or garbage beer at the least.


bosco

Idunno, at that point, the finished beer is pretty acidic and alcoholic, so, you're not going to get any mold or anything. It might be the wild yeast or lacto or brett on the raisins that's fermenting them out rather than residual brewer's yeast, but they make up such a small volume of the total fermentables that you're probably getting more flavor from the raisins themselves than any bugs they bring with them. I doubt the prohibition-era brewers were making brews with too many residual higher-order sugars to chew on, or aging them long enough for the raisin bugs to chew on them... but, then, if you're dropping raisins into a beer you plan on cellaring for a few months, you're probably a pretty experimental type of brewer who won't mind rolling the dice on spontaneous raisins yeasts.

I might try it with a few bottles on my next brew, just to see. My guess the biggest problem would be inconsistencies in carbonation.

Would you grind them up or put them in whole?

SoupNazi said:

Would you grind them up or put them in whole?

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I think the recipe says to just drop them in whole. You would probably get more floties if you grind them up.

Raisins host yeast on their surface.

My concern would be gushers and bottle bombs and basically just not knowing what you're going to end up with depending on what type/how many wild yeast/bugs are present. How could you know how far the wild stuff would continue to attenuate?

Its interesting. I would think grinding them would only make fermentation faster. As for surface microbes you could soak them in vodka first.

Many raisins are covered in sulfur/sulfates before drying. Helps control wild yeasts, but might prevent the yeast in the bottle from carbonating at all. Personally if i tried this i would use organic raisins and soak them in ever-clear for a few minutes.

or if you want raisin flavor for your Belgians or what-have-you, add them to secondary and use your normal priming sugar for carbonation.

Subscribed. If anyone tests this please reply. Thanks!

Chromebrew said:

Subscribed. If anyone tests this please reply. Thanks!

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I got a bottling day coming up in a 2 weeks, I'm going to set aside a few bottles to experiment with. I'll let you know how it all comes out.

I was speaking with my friend's dad a few months back. He was a homebrewer back in the early 90's and he was telling me he used raisins for carbonating a few times. He said it worked great. No bombs, good head, etc. I didn't ask how may per bottle, or if he took steps to sanitize them, but I do know they went in whole.

I have also seen this recipe and just bottled today. Although I was worried about ruining my entire batch and only primed half of them with raisins. I'll post back and let you know what happens. (ie. How many diseases I pick-up, or how many flats and bombs I make.)

PlinyTheElder said:

I have also seen this recipe and just bottled today. Although I was worried about ruining my entire batch and only primed half of them with raisins. I'll post back and let you know what happens. (ie. How many diseases I pick-up, or how many flats and bombs I make.)

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How many did you put in? What were your methods (if any) to putting them in? I'm going to bottle before the weekend, I plan to putting aside a few bottles and try different methods out. Keep us posted.

very interesting

naristov said:

How many did you put in? What were your methods (if any) to putting them in? I'm going to bottle before the weekend, I plan to putting aside a few bottles and try different methods out. Keep us posted.

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So I tried to follow the recipe and story regarding the raisins. I put 4 moderately sized raisins in each bottle and then filled the bottles. I didn't prep them by washing or cleansing them in anyway. Sounds risky after reading all the posts on this thread. I convinced myself that the alcohol and acidity of the beer would be enough to combat any bugs.

My Dad brewed once in the 60's. I do remember it did have at least one raisin in each bottle. I was young so I do not know if it was for carbonation or not.

I remember chatting with an elderly fellow that used to home brew all the time at his farm and said he used raisins in his brews to ferment it. Guessing there must be some kind of wild yeasts on it? I tried raisins in a couple brews, though not to ferment it and found they added nothing to the final product except for some nasty looking white balls floating around my fermenter. Live and learn I guess.

Can't wait to see how this experiment turns out though.

subscribed.

Bump! Hoping Naristov had some results to share. If anyone has results let us know please.

I'll have a black butte porter clone ready to bottle in a week or so that I will use raisins in if no one has done this by then. It can't be that hard. I wonder what the minimum amount of beers would be necessary to make some predictions. It would be good to see 2 beers each with 2, 3, and 4 raisins, and 1 beer with 5 raisins. Open 1 beer each at 10 days to check the carbonation and at several months open the rest including the one 5 raisin beer that hopefully hasn't exploded by then. This long term test would check for contamination problems.
Take some of each beer and run on a stir plate to knock the C02 out of them and check their gravity. A beer like a porter will have plenty of residual sugar to compare the final gravities amongst the beers. Use one unprimed capped beer and two sugar primed beers as controls.
Anything else?

I have a beer I bottled last week with raisins. About 2 gallons bottle conditioned with raisins and 3 gallons primed with corn sugar. We used 3 raisins in each bottle. We also primed the other 3 gallons at 2.2 vols (I think). I haven't opened any of them yet. I will check back when I have some notes.

awesome, i cant wait to hear back!

on a side note, i was suprised by how much flavor raisins can contribute. I really like the flavor, but oddly i dont like to eat them by themselves.

Chromebrew said:

Bump! Hoping Naristov had some results to share. If anyone has results let us know please.

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I forgot. It's been a weird couple of months for me, esp in terms of brewing. I have an EggNog stout fermenting as we speak 2 more weeks till bottling.

Anyone try this with a Belgian quad or dubbel? How did it turn out? Better or worse than normal priming sugar?

Three raisins carbed perfectly

DacotahBrewing said:

Three raisins carbed perfectly

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Awesome! Thanks for the update. What is the beer? Did it contribute anything to the flavor?

Always wanted to try this in a Belgian-style! Dacotah, can you comment on the taste?

This is really interesting. Was thinking about making a high gravity spiced/winter beer early next year for next xmas. Would be interesting to carb it with raisins

DacotahBrewing said:

Three raisins carbed perfectly

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Well it sure looks good to me, but how does it taste?
Scooter, a spiced beer sounds like a great idea. I'm salivating about using them in a nut brown ale to accentuate that plum and raisin flavor.
Hell, use it in a farmhouse ale.

I am also interested in hearing if the raisins added anything to the final product outside of good carbonation.

Also, how long did you let it bottle condition for?

Sorry I didn't give much information in my last post. A fellow Brewer and I were attempting to make an oatmeal raisin cookie beer. We used raisins in the primary as well as spicing it with cinnamon, nutmeg, Ginger, clove, and vanilla. The raisins never came through so the beer is basically a spiced brown ale.

Carbing with raisins added zero flavor. Even with a pound of raisins in primary and using crystal 120 in the malt bill the raisins just never came through.

I would be interested in carbing with other fruit. Figs come to mind.

It has been bottle conditioning for a week and a half.

I'm going to add a link of this discussion to the post in the bottling sticky about alternative priming methods.

I also want to add that carbing with raisins in other styles might come through better. The beer we used it in had a lot going on with spicing and the malt bill. It could add a nice complexity to a saison.

Also be aware that when you pour from the bottle the raisins will be floating and stripped of their color. Your friends might not like the sight of off-white solids floating in their beer.

DacotahBrewing said:

Three raisins carbed perfectly

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One more thought, what size bottles did you use? I wonder if you'd scale the amount of raisins to fit the size of your bottle, considering the volume of beer will vary slightly.

I'll be packaging a Patersbier in a couple weeks. I'm considering this for a couple of them.

Thanks for your feedback!

DRonco said:

One more thought, what size bottles did you use? I wonder if you'd scale the amount of raisins to fit the size of your bottle, considering the volume of beer will vary slightly.

I'll be packaging a Patersbier in a couple weeks. I'm considering this for a couple of them.

Thanks for your feedback!

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We used 12oz bottles. We did fill one bomber and doubled the raisins to 6. I am not sure why we chose to double them. I suspect it will be a bottle bomb but who knows. I will follow up when I know.

I want to give some more feedback now that it has been a few weeks.

I have had both raisin carbed beer and the corn sugar primed beer side by side and have not found much different.

What I have found different is the raisins carbed the beer more than the measured sugar did. We primed half the batch to 2.2 Vols and we used 3 raisins in each bottle for the other half. The raisin batch seems to have a little more carbonation.

I still can not confirm any sort of flavor from the raisins. I feel like there is a very, very slight difference between the two, but I am unsure if its because I know they are different. I think I will have to do a blind tasting with a few people and see if they can find a difference.

I will say that the carbonating with the raisins has leveled off. I know there were some people that thought the raisins would add some wild yeast, but I do not think this will be the case. Maybe we got lucky (we did not sanitize the fruit in any way, and we dropped them into bottles with unsanitized hands). We used organic raisins with no sulfites or preservatives.

I also have not found any inconsistencies with the carbonation. We did not pick through the raisins to find like sizes -- we used whatever we grabbed, but only 3. Smaller, larger, medium, whatever. The odd thing that I have been finding is, as I pour the beer, and subsequently the raisins, all 3 of the raisins have swelled to almost exactly the same size.

I am interested to hear what others will find. It seems as though there are a few other people out there that are giving this a try. I say it's worth the experiment. I have not, in any way, found this practice to ruin the beer.

I'm going to try to bottle my Patersbier on Sunday. I plan to do this experiment on a few of them.