RECIPE HELP: Hers and His wedding gifts

[bransona]

I have a wedding coming up this summer. My significant other's sister is marrying a great guy, and I want to give them a truly unique and personal gift. So, beer it is. Based on their favorite beers, the two I've chosen to tackle will be:

Hers: An Imperial Chocolate Cherry Stout. This one will be based loosely on the Founder's Porter, but ramped up to near RIS levels. Gonna brew it soon, rack to a secondary with frozen, crushed cherries for a while, then back to another with cacao nibs. If anyone has suggestions for best practice here, that would be helpful. I've not used whole fruits before.

His: An Irish Red ale. Honestly I just need your favorite Irish Red. I've never made one, but I love the style.

The stout will age for 3 months or more throughout the process. I don't know what sort of timeframe I should allow for the Red.

 

[Rob2010SS]

Here are my thoughts....

Stout - No need to transfer to 3rd fermenter. When primary fermentation is over, transfer to a secondary container with both the cacao nibs and the cherries. For the cherries, my suggestion would be frozen. I'd smash and freeze them. You could thaw them and freeze them one more time after but once should be sufficient. The freezing will take care of any unwanted bugs and will burst the cells of the fruit allowing for more flavor extraction. For the cacao nibs, soak them in some sort of alcohol (vodka is usually the choice) for MINIMUM of 1 week prior to use. This will help in the flavor extraction process.

Irish Red - Never done one so I don't have a recipe for you. As far as time frame, assuming you're bottling, you're looking at 4-5 weeks before it's ready to drink. This includes the bottle carbonation process.

Good luck on these. The stout sounds good.

 

[TimmyWit]

I have used whole fruit and I have also used puree. Now that I've used puree, I'll probably never use whole fruit again. It's a lot easier to work with and IMO, you can get more consistent results since you don't have to factor in variables such as the ripeness of the whole fruit. The downside to puree is it can be a bit pricey.

I have a sour with cherries bottled now where I used 2lb/gallon of puree as per the recommendation here:
http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Soured_Fruit_Beer
The cherry came through nice on that one but it didn't have much to compete with. If I was doing a RIS, I would probably consider stepping that up to 3lb/gallon.

There is another good reference for working with fruit here:
http://brewwiki.com/index.php/Fruit

 

[TimmyWit]

One more thing to stew on. When I started using fruit, I assumed I was bumping the gravity. Obviously fruit has a lot of sugar but it also has a lot of water. If you check out the gravity of cherry puree, you'll notice that it's actually lower than the gravity of your RIS so logic would imply that you are actually lowering your total gravity. I don't think it will make a huge difference but just something to consider.

Here is a pretty good chart with approximate gravities of fruit puree
http://www.brewersconnection.com/catalog/oregon-fruit-puree.html

I also really like the wide-mouth PET carboys when working with fruit. If this is a one-off, it's probably not worth the investment. But, if you think it's something you'll do more of in the future, those carboys make it a little easier.

 

[madscientist451]

My experience with brewing
is that there is usually something I want to tweak, something that could be better, the first time I brew a certain style or recipe. An imperial Chocolate cherry stout is a pretty complicated beer with a lot of variables. If you don't have time to brew and re-brew this before the wedding, your gift beer may not be all that great, or maybe you'll beat the odds and make a fantastic brew the first time around. I've added cherries to beer several times and getting a consistent result is somewhat tricky.
If you don't have time for multiple brews, there's a solution: Split the batch in half, the first half use the fruit and cacao nibs, but for the other batch, get some Cholaca and do some blending trials to get the chocolate note you are looking for, then hit your liquor store and get some Cherry Liqueur like this one:

https://shop.iowaabd.com/dekuyper-michigan-cherry

And do some more blending trials to see if you get what you want. You can even try cherry/chocolate liqueur if you want to. When your beer with the fruit is done, you can compare and see what worked best, you'll have some choices.
Commercial breweries can't use cherry liqueurs to flavor their beers but there's nothing wrong with doing it at home.
Here's a link to a story about Cholaca:

https://www.craftbrewingbusiness.co...o-brew-the-best-chocolate-beer-using-cholaca/

 

[TimmyWit]

Solid advice and neat info about the Cholaca. I have some beer going now that I brewed for a homebrew fest. It’s all pilot batches so I’m nervous about how it will turn out even though I’m giving it away to people I don’t even know. I think for something like this I would want to plan a rebrew with tweaks as well or have a backup plan.

As far as the chocolate, I did a breakfast stout clone from BYO once that used bittersweet chocolate in addition to the cacao nibs. I went with Ghirardelli and the chocolate came through great in that one. It held up nice as well even after 2+ years in the bottle.