Bottling Belgian Quad with Kriek

[kdw2pd]

Hi all,

I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction. I have a 3.5 gallon Bourbon Barrel Quad-inspired brew sitting in secondary that I'm hoping to bottle in a few weeks. Rather than have it sit on cherries (the BBQ cherry flavor is overpowering to me), I'm hoping to take the Ommegang Three Philosophers approach and add a dry kriek to the bottling bucket to give it some cherry flavor. I've read a couple of threads that mention the process, but didn't answer what I needed.

I had a few questions about the process:
1.) How much kriek to add, and when. Ommegang uses 2% Liefman's, but 2.5% gives me ~11ounces, or basically one bottle. Should I add it directly to the bottling bucket, or to secondary? Should I let it flatten out to let some of the CO2 out of the bottle, or just pour directly in?
2.) How much priming sugar to add with the kriek? I have regular recycled beer bottles, so I'll be priming to the max 3.0 vols, which would be 4.1oz of corn sugar, according to BeerSmith. Would the kriek affect how much sugar to add?
3.) Bottle conditioning: Would adding the kriek affect the amount of yeast I add for bottle conditioning? More/less?

Thanks!

 

[ruger988]

This is interesting and I'm curious to know the answers to these questions as well as what you end up doing and how it works out. Sorry I can't be of any help.

IOW - Tagged.

 

[strambo]

I think your overthinking it. Just put a bottle of Kriek in the bucket, add the priming sugar and rack the beer on it.


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[vagabondat02]

If you add an unpasteurized kriek to a clean beer, the bugs in the lambic will start to consume residual sugars left over from your sacch fermentation. You'll most likely end up with bottle bombs, especially if you're aiming for a high CO2 volume to begin with.

 

[BGBC]

If you're specifically thinking of using Liefman's, I don't think it has viable dregs (probably pasteurized before it's backsweetened), so I don't think you've have to worry about the bugs in your quad.

The residual sugars in the kriek might throw off your priming calculations, but you could degas the kriek and take a hydro reading to get an idea of the sugar you're adding.

In the end, I don't think it would make a big difference (priming sugar-wise).

 

[sweetcell]

add the whole bottle, you'll be fine.

i consider 3.0 vols to be the upper limit for regular beer bottles. i wouldn't prime that high, especially if you're adding an unknown such as the kriek (which might have fermentable sugars in it... or not). i would give myself a safety margin and prime to 2.6-2.7.

the Leifmann's won't effect your re-yeasting. the stuff is dead, there are no viable cells in there. re-yeast as if the kriek wasn't there.

 

[ruger988]

Curious if you gave this a shot and how it worked out if so?

 

[kdw2pd]

Got a message about this, so posting a follow-up. It was a 3.5 gallon batch, so I added 12oz of Lindeman's kriek, used corn sugar to carb to 2.7vols, and bottle conditioned with Safbrew T-58 using the Northern Brewer specs for Belgians (~20bil/5 gallons).

After about 6 weeks the quad was coming around nicely, but the cherry from the kriek was still quite sharp. Fast forward another 6 weeks and it's a pretty nice quad with a little bit of cherry in the finish. The kriek also adds an appealing red color to the pour.

No bottle bombs or any issues at all. This is a great way of getting some cherry or other flavors into a beer without having to let your beer secondary on fruit for all eternity.

Per the suggestions above, I treated bottle conditioning and carbing as if the kriek weren't there, and it turned out perfectly. If anything, you could carb higher than 2.7vols, I don't think the yeast ate enough kriek to increase the CO2 markedly, but I was going on the safe side.