Any reason why you can't mash using hot fruit juice?

I was thinking of doing a apple barleywine or something along those lines. I can't see how different hot apple juice would be from water, except for pH. If I made changes to the schedule to lower pH or to cause the pH to not be risen, would it work?

I would just make the cider and barleywine separately, but then blending them would make it a weaker beverage than I was looking for.

There's an episode of Basic Brewing on Youtube where they replace the water with watermelon juice and make a wheat beer. It looked pretty neat.

It'll have a pectin haze unless you add pectinase

Rubes said:

There's an episode of Basic Brewing on Youtube where they replace the water with watermelon juice and make a wheat beer. It looked pretty neat.

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If I remember correctly, it didn't work out as planned. I can't recall if it actually messed up the beer, or if they just couldn't taste the watermelon, either way it was better just to use water.

Qhrumphf said:

If I remember correctly, it didn't work out as planned. I can't recall if it actually messed up the beer, or if they just couldn't taste the watermelon, either way it was better just to use water.

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Yeah, I listened to the podcast when they talked about it. It 'worked' in that they got beer, but they said they wouldn't do it again.

I remember they were not very impressed with the beer and it pretty much had no watermelon flavour, defeating the purpose of it in the first place. Still, it might be an interesting experiment sometime.

Watermelon is a pretty damn subtle flavour, though. I imagine even a small amount of heat would blow out anything you could taste to begin with.

I think it would be interesting to try 2 side-by-side batches where you a) mash with water as normal then add concentrated juice, and b) mash using hot juice.

I did an apple Saison that turned out nice. I did not put the juice in the mash or boil. I did a partial boil and used some apple juice as top off liquid in the fermenter.

beergolf said:

I did an apple Saison that turned out nice. I did not put the juice in the mash or boil. I did a partial boil and used some apple juice as top off liquid in the fermenter.

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I did this too with a highish-gravity Belgian ale. It turned out to be one of the best beers I've made.

i did not use juice, but i did do an all grain pale with 100% fresh maple sap. overshot my gravity by a touch. plan on spiken it with some syrup after it has been carbed an cooled.

The sugar concentration in juice would cause major efficiency issues in the mash. It would probably be best to do a standard mash and boil down to an abnormally high gravity, then dilute to desired OG with juice.

Stout-n-Braggot said:

The sugar concentration in juice would cause major efficiency issues in the mash. It would probably be best to do a standard mash and boil down to an abnormally high gravity, then dilute to desired OG with juice.

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Actually juice has sugar in it so it is very fermentable. You can figure it out by looking at the nutrition label and calculating the amount of sugar in the juice.

Stout-n-Braggot said:

The sugar concentration in juice would cause major efficiency issues in the mash. It would probably be best to do a standard mash and boil down to an abnormally high gravity, then dilute to desired OG with juice.

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Which would cause major efficiency issue wrt propane. Just tossing extra grain in to counter lost extraction efficiency might be best.

beergolf said:

Actually juice has sugar in it so it is very fermentable. You can figure it out by looking at the nutrition label and calculating the amount of sugar in the juice.

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Of course juice is fermentable, thats why we can make cidre.

What I mean is that when you use a liquid that already has high concentrations of sugars (or other soluble compounds) it limits how much more sugar can be drawn into solution, thus causing efficiency issues in mashing. Maple sap has a very low concentration of sugar, so it can be an excellent mashing liquid. Juice has a much higher concentration, so it would be problematic.

Stout-n-Braggot said:

What I mean is that when you use a liquid that already has high concentrations of sugars (or other soluble compounds) it limits how much more sugar can be drawn into solution, thus causing efficiency issues in mashing. Maple sap has a very low concentration of sugar, so it can be an excellent mashing liquid. Juice has a much higher concentration, so it would be problematic.

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Google "Double Mashing" or "Reiterated Mashing"

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/reiterated-mashing-notes-51706/

Apparently, using a liquor that already has sugars in it doesnt affect that liquid's ability to activate the starch to sugar enzymatic process.

I'd guess that the acidity of the juice may be an issue, however.

And, from making wine from various fruits and juices, i'd venture to guess that you'd need a pretty flavorful juice to really make a big impact on the beer, like grape, blackberry, plum, etc, and those don't sound like they'd mix very well with the beer, to me. (i tried the widmer brothers reserve Muskat Grape Lemongrass beer and wasnt a fan).

Maybe Applejuice? Then again, if you can buy a can of pure frozen concentrate, there wouldnt be much difference to mashing with the juice versus tossing hte concentrate in at the end of the boil.

SouthBay said:

Google "Double Mashing" or "Reiterated Mashing"

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/reiterated-mashing-notes-51706/

Apparently, using a liquor that already has sugars in it doesnt affect that liquid's ability to activate the starch to sugar enzymatic process.

I'd guess that the acidity of the juice may be an issue, however.

And, from making wine from various fruits and juices, i'd venture to guess that you'd need a pretty flavorful juice to really make a big impact on the beer, like grape, blackberry, plum, etc, and those don't sound like they'd mix very well with the beer, to me. (i tried the widmer brothers reserve Muskat Grape Lemongrass beer and wasnt a fan).

Maybe Applejuice? Then again, if you can buy a can of pure frozen concentrate, there wouldnt be much difference to mashing with the juice versus tossing hte concentrate in at the end of the boil.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chatelier's_principle

Right.

In a mash, youre converting, not extracting.

So changes in concentration seem to be irrelevant, which is why double mashes like this are reported to work.

You may end up with less overall efficiency, because the nature of the process usually doesn't include sparging anything other than the last mash, from what I read.

Then again, I'm not a chemist, so take it for what its worth

Thanks for your reply guys.

Instead of mashing enough grain for barleywine in the apple juice, I would simply do a regular "very high" OG barleywine mash then dilute it to a "high" OG with juice or concentrate. I could do that side by side with a apple juice mash, then balance the OGs with water.

Probably won't do that, though. I'd rather splash some hard cider into some beer first to see if I actually like the taste of them together. I think hops and apple would go nicely together.

"grafflewine" perhaps...?

Stout-n-Braggot said:

"grafflewine" perhaps...?

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Like a "grain apfelwein"? Could be interesting. It's be a similar idea, since you're dissolving extra fermentables into the juice before pouring it into the fermenter.

I am coincidentally planning on doing a "grappleblack cider" with grape juice, apple/blackcurrant juice, and freeze-concentrated apple juice. Probably will end up around 7 or 8 percent though; no grains. Too many flavours already.

I was at a bar in normal, IL a few years ago and they served up a lot of interesting takes on a black and tan. One of my faves was an amber lager and a hard cider.

Anyways I think itd be worth trying! That combo of grains, hops and apple is pretty good

As an experiment, I used 2 lbs of honey and 2 lbs less of my marris otter to mash a pale ale, yesterday. I didn't do it for flavor. My city water tastes very good but has a high residual alkalinity. Usually I just mash a darker grist to get my pH low enough. Can't seem to get anything better than 18 srm to convert. But I have done several 3~5 srm trials dilluting with distilled water and adding cal. chlo. and/ or gypsum to get a lighter color beer. The flavor always betrays the fact that I used salts. So, using 2 lbs honey in 10 lbs of malt at .40 gal per lb, I got a pH of ~5.1. 4-ish srm, 1.057 og. 6 gallons in fermenter w/ trub. I mashed hotter and hopped lower because this grist won't give me any honey flavor, and might not be malty at all. In a month I will taste it and tweek from here with less pale malt and some specialty grains. Next weekend's batch I will try a sort of 7-10 srm aroma malt red ale with a gallon of apple juice in the mash and a gallon in the sparge to help with pH.

Maybe you could mash with water and sparge with apple juice (or vice-versa)? Actually mashing with juice and sparging with water might the best way to deal with efficiency issues. The water sparge would help extract some of the sugars your juice mash leaves behind, and the sugary juice that the grain absorbs.

I think Mashing with just juice would cause my mash pH to drop into the 4s, and I would end up with some sort of winey cider/ beer type thing. A and B amylase don't work in the 4s as good as they do 5.2 to 5.6, so starch conversion would be not what we want. Looks like if I used any more honey, the base malt would have pulled my mash pH down into the 4s too. After two weeks, I kegged and tasted it. No honey flavor, of course, and it is a little too boozy. I have great cascade flavor. The bad thing was it was sour tart. I think, Partly this was mashed too low at about 5.1- so I overcompensated for the RA. Also, maybe it was because Safale S-04 is Whitbread and it isn't done with acetaldehyde at two weeks. So I threw it back into a 5 gal carboy, pitched some cask ale yeast hoping it would straiten out the aceteldehyde, and took the opportunity to dry hop it with some more cascade. I will tap it again in a couple more weeks and describe it again. Also, I will make the apple juice beer now informed by the honey experiment. Apparently, I don't have as big an RA problem as I thought. I need to use less apple juice than the 2 gallons I was planning to.