Adding currants/raisins to secondary

[ahpsp]

I'd like to add a couple of pounds of currants to a few gallons of wort in secondary for a winter saison. I don't want a sour beer (at least not this batch), and I'm not sure of the best practices for adding dried fruit in a sanitary way. The four ways I can think to add it are 1) add it with no treatment; 2) add it after rinsing with Star San; 3) add it after boiling it for a few minutes along with the boiling water; and, 4) add it after a soak in vodka. I think a fifth way would be to use Camden tablets along with water, but I'm not sure how to do that.

I've read a couple of other threads about this but nobody seemed to be definitive about something that worked for them, so I'm posting this thread.

Any suggestions or experience?

 

[motorneuron]

I would use either 3 or 4. For dried fruit, you might also consider putting the fruit with some water, running that through a blender, and then briefly boiling that mixture. That will expose more of the internal fruit to liquid, which will give you more sugar and more fruit flavor.

If you don't want the fruit to be cooked at all (which can change the flavor of some kinds of fruit more than others, though if it's already dried, it's not exactly the same flavor as fresh fruit), use method 4 instead. Once again, you can do this with some blending first.

Bear in mind that by secondary, the risk of infection is far less than in primary. You've already removed most of the oxygen, and you have a built-in preservative--alcohol. So it's harder to infect a beer at that stage.