Priming with fruit juice concentrate?

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scone

scone

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I brewed a double chocolate cherry stout using 1 can of the Oregon sweet cherry puree (about 3 lbs of puree) and the flavor of cherries is pretty much undetectable in the fermented beer.

I was hoping to remedy the situation by bottling with cherry concentrate instead of dextrose. Will this add some cherry flavor and aroma to the beer?

The concentrate has a 3 to 4 ration of sugars to "carbohydrates". Is it correct that the yeast will only eat the sugars and leave the rest? I'm trying to equate the standard 4.5 oz of dextrose to the amount of concentrate I should use. Do I just ensure that I've got about 128g of sugars mixed in with the beer?

Will using only cherry concentrate to bottle create too much cherry flavor? I'd lik it to be subtle. Thanks! :mug:
 
Adding the cherry concentrate is a little too risky for me. The amount of fermentables is probably available somewhere, but I'm not sure if you'll know the answer to how much flavor and aroma it will add.

What I would do is get some cherry extract. Take a small sample from your batch and start adding drops of the extract until the flavor and aroma is to your liking. Then scale up the amount and put it in your entire batch prior to bottling. I learned that information from listening to the Jamil show on fruit beers. I recommend you listen to it if you have the time.

http://thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/The-Jamil-Show/Fruit-Beers-The-Jamil-Show-04-24-06
 
would it be faulty logic to mix a pint of water with the amount of cane sugar one would use for bottling, then take the specific gravity (funny, I have never done this). Note the amount.

Mix a solution of cherry concentrate of the same specific gravity and volume.

It would seem to me to be an alternate way of expressing an amount of sugar for bottling... one pint at 1.035 (or whatever it really is, I made that up).

But I use faulty logic a to jusitify not paying attention in class when I was younger... so feel free to show me my error in thinking.

And I am in no way saying the previous post is wrong or off base. I highly reccomend listening to the link. I am merely asking an ancillary question/ offering my observation.

:mug:
 
I'm pretty sure that would work.

You could also ferment some out with some yeast (probably bread yeast if you wanted to be cheap) and measure the FG. That way you would know the fermentability.
 
I have thought about this another time, but just never followed up as I have yet to actually follow through with bottling with fruit juice. I was thinking of doing it with a cider/apfelwine for a subtle something.

I definately agree with the variability on flavor and aroma... it would be much less predictable than an extract.

I guess it all depends on who the audience for your final product is (BCJP judge?) and how experimental you feel.

I can always farm it out at a party if it is not great!
 
You know, now that I think about it, you could do the same thing I recommended with the concentrate. Just add drops until the flavor and aroma are to your liking. After that, you can multiply it up and see how much volume it would be for the whole batch. If it's something like 1 gallon, you know it's not feasible.
 
Thanks for the responses everyone. As it turns out, I *was* feeling experimental... :D

I went ahead and primed with cherry concentrate. I figured I was shooting for around 128g of sugar so I bought three 8 oz black cherry concentrates and since they didn't have any more the store, I also used 8 oz of regular black cherry juice.

Ok wow I just realized something as I typed that. I overprimed the bejesus out of my beer! :( Yikes. I don't know what I was thinking yesterday, but I'm waaaay off on the sugar. I was trying to add ~128g sugar but actually added 313g of sugar. Good lord. I hope that cherry concentrate is rather minimally fermentable. I just plugged some stuff into a priming calculator and I'm going to have between 4.5 and 5 volumes CO2 if the sugar in the concentrate is anything like sucrose.

I just moved the conditioning beers into a plastic box in case they explode. I'm hoping the bottles can handle the pressure (they are supposed to go to about 4 right?). Maybe I can recap them in a week.
 
scone said:
Thanks for the responses everyone. As it turns out, I *was* feeling experimental... :D

I went ahead and primed with cherry concentrate. I figured I was shooting for around 128g of sugar so I bought three 8 oz black cherry concentrates and since they didn't have any more the store, I also used 8 oz of regular black cherry juice.

Ok wow I just realized something as I typed that. I overprimed the bejesus out of my beer! :( Yikes. I don't know what I was thinking yesterday, but I'm waaaay off on the sugar. I was trying to add ~128g sugar but actually added 313g of sugar. Good lord. I hope that cherry concentrate is rather minimally fermentable. I just plugged some stuff into a priming calculator and I'm going to have between 4.5 and 5 volumes CO2 if the sugar in the concentrate is anything like sucrose.

I just moved the conditioning beers into a plastic box in case they explode. I'm hoping the bottles can handle the pressure (they are supposed to go to about 4 right?). Maybe I can recap them in a week.
Click to expand...

curious about an update - I'm about to bottle some cider with apple juice concentrate and am going to shoot for ~70 grams of sugar (for a 3 gallon batch). Any idea how fermentable your concentrate was?
 
Unfortunately no. What I can say is this:

I vented all the bottles about a week in. Uncapped them (had a few gushers so I lost a bit of beer), and let them sit uncapped for 30 minutes to degass. I feel like most of the co2 was in the headspace and not in the actual beer at this point. Since recapping, all of the bottles have reached what I would say is a pretty nice level of carbonation for a stout, if not a tad bit high. I would have definitely had insane carbonation if I would have left them capped for the whole duration, and probably some bottle bombs. That's terribly unscientific, but that's all I can really say... :-(

If I had to guess, I'd say concentrate is pretty fermentable, at least what they say at "sugars" in the nutritional info would I think equates to fructose pretty well. Hope that helps.
 
scone said:
Unfortunately no. What I can say is this:

I vented all the bottles about a week in. Uncapped them (had a few gushers so I lost a bit of beer), and let them sit uncapped for 30 minutes to degass. I feel like most of the co2 was in the headspace and not in the actual beer at this point. Since recapping, all of the bottles have reached what I would say is a pretty nice level of carbonation for a stout, if not a tad bit high. I would have definitely had insane carbonation if I would have left them capped for the whole duration, and probably some bottle bombs. That's terribly unscientific, but that's all I can really say... :-(

If I had to guess, I'd say concentrate is pretty fermentable, at least what they say at "sugars" in the nutritional info would I think equates to fructose pretty well. Hope that helps.
Click to expand...

Glad you didn't get any bombs. I figured most of the sugars would be fermentable, so I bottled 3 gallons today with 150ml of concentrate (just over 5 fluid ounces; 0.63 cups), which should have given me ~73 grams of sugar (2.57 ounces). I'm shooting for 2.5 volumes of CO2. I'm hoping too that the concentrate adds some apple flavor.
 

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