Prickly pear saison gone wrong.

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JBOGAN

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Scratching my head on this beer and may very well dump it. This will be my second dumper of 80+ batches and its a real bummer. My girlfriend wanted a Saison with a fruit addition so I decided why not use prickly pear since I rarely do fruit beers, great idea?. Recipe was around 90% pils and 10% wheat using wy3711, this is a base for Saisons I use often when trying to make a new recipe to make my own. Brew day procedures went fine, sanitation went fine, even adding fruit to the primary went fine.

When I took my final gravity reading the base beer came through and you could tell it was a saison and the prickly pear gave a slight melon/cucumber tone that was really refreshing. Last night I put it on tap after carbing in the keg for over two weeks and it may be the most astringent and medicinal mess ever. Could the seeds be the culprit for the tannins ?, there were a lot of them. Tap water somewhere in the process for the medicinal taste?
 
Prickly pears taste medicinal to me, anyway. I grew up in the desert, and we picked prickly pears all the time, since my parents loved the jelly my mother made out of them. I couldn't stand it. The seeds could very well be the culprit, since that's where the tannin concentrates.
 
My first instinct was to go with regular pear but the Mr.Beer new brewer mad scientist side came out, that guy will always get you in trouble.
 
I am definitely interested in this. I am getting ready to brew a prickly pear White IPA for spring and I am not sure when to add the pear flavors (mine have been boiled and juiced already). I spent about 2 hours prepping mine by removing the spines skins and seeds, I then blended them and boiled for 20mins before using a splatter screen to strainer the juice. The juice has been frozen for months now and I am hoping the prep work will pay off but I go back to the original thought about when to add them to get the full flavor?
 
If the gravity sample tasted fine, it sounds like it got infected in the keg or on the way into the keg.

Or did you leave the pear in the keg too? And 2 more weeks on the skins and stuff extracted medicinal flavors?
 
Just for clarification how and when did you add the Prickly Pear?

Added at the tail end of fermentation in primary. Used a nylon drawstring bag that was boiled and sprayed down with star san, I then added freshly cleaned prickly pear.
 
Added at the tail end of fermentation in primary. Used a nylon drawstring bag that was boiled and sprayed down with star san, I then added freshly cleaned prickly pear.

That's what happened. I have let the prickly pear juice naturally ferment from the wild yeast on it. It went crazy eating up the sugars from the fruit.
 
When I want to add Prickly Pear fruit to a beer this is how I did it.
Once I have the fruit I will put it in a SS strainer and rinse it off.
Then it goes into a J.L juicer. I don't worry about the spines, skin or seeds. The juicer does a pretty good job of filtering those out.
I put the juice in 1 gallon containers until I'm done. Then it goes into freezer bags and is frozen.
When I want to make a beer with the PP I'll take it out and let it thaw out. I'll filter out the solids and refreeze it in plastic bottles.
Then I let half of it drip thaw into another bottle. I do this until I have 1 liter of Prickly Pear juice concentrate.
This will then go into a 5 gallon batch of beer at the end of the boil.
And the results.

Prickly Pear.jpg


PP Processing.jpg


PP Juice.jpg


PP Wheat.jpg
 
My beer looks just like that...but lacks the taste that one most likely has.
 
When I want to add Prickly Pear fruit to a beer this is how I did it.
Once I have the fruit I will put it in a SS strainer and rinse it off.
Then it goes into a J.L juicer. I don't worry about the spines, skin or seeds. The juicer does a pretty good job of filtering those out.
I put the juice in 1 gallon containers until I'm done. Then it goes into freezer bags and is frozen.
When I want to make a beer with the PP I'll take it out and let it thaw out. I'll filter out the solids and refreeze it in plastic bottles.
Then I let half of it drip thaw into another bottle. I do this until I have 1 liter of Prickly Pear juice concentrate.
This will then go into a 5 gallon batch of beer at the end of the boil.
And the results.

I will try this next time for sure. Those spines are little bastards.
 
I will try this next time for sure. Those spines are little bastards.

Don't worry about them. The J.L. juicer does a good job of filtering them out. A few may get by but they end up dissolving. I drink a little of the stuff before freezing and a lot of it after freezing. I only use the cheese cloth after freezing if I'm going to be using it in a beer.

If you look at the closer jugs of PP juice you can see some of the solids that get through the juicer are floating on top and the pure juice is on the bottom. When I'm putting it into the freezer bag I shake the jug up and then pour.

When we thaw it out I use some for breakfast every morning and SWMBO uses it in smoothies every day.

Burning or some other means of removing the spines is a waste of time.

Happy Brewing.
 
Have you tried brewing with the Prickly Pear yet. I went out and picked some more this summer and ended up with 22 gallons of juice. I'm going to be brewing a PP IPA in the next day or two.
 
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