Adding fruit

[GRHunter]

I am still experimenting on ways to make good fruit beers for my wife. Up until now I have been racking my beer onto my fruit in a secondary. But due to all the residual fruit stuff it almost looks like I need to do another secondary (a thirdary?) for clearing. That got me to thinking, after 5 days in the primary why can’t I just add the fruit directly to the primary? Then let it sit for a couple of weeks in the primary and then rack it into a secondary for clearing.

 

[Holycrepe]

We are in the process of making a Blueberry Cream Ale, and are racking it off the yeast tomorrow and going do a "second primary" by using another bucket, which will give us more headspace and make for easier adding/cleaning of the blueberries, with the only possible negative being possible discoloring of that bucket, planning then to move it to carboy for a true secondary phase next week..

So unless someone with "real" knowledge comes along to set me straight, I will be doing exactly what your talking about doing as well.

 

[Bentpirate]

My understanding with adding fruit to the secondary; you want to remove as much trub and yeast as you can - 1. so be beer isn't sitting on all the primary yeast longer and 2. so the added sugars in the fruit with all the yeast start another fermentation causing the fruit falvor to be removed. Being the secondary is for conditioning and clearing, how are you preparing the fruit and what type of fruit are you adding?
Peaches for example are very fibrous and tend to break down in the secondary causing a third or forth 'secondary' along with filtering to get anything close to clear.
Something you may want to consider; make a fruit concentrate. Boil the fruit in a light sugar water, let most of the water evaporate and add the concentrate instead of the actual fruit. I am in the middle of making a Raspberry-Hefe. When the raspberry's were ripe we boiled them down in a concentrate and will add to secondary this weekend. I hope this helps....

 

[JayInJersey]

Bah...forget the secondary. Just toss your fruit right into the primary about a week or two in, then rack the whole thing off to keg or bottles after 3 or 4 weeks.

My fruit beers come out just as clear as my others.

 

[billc68]

It's called a "tertiary" and in making wines from fruit, they often rack it about 4-6 times or more, so yes a tertiary for fruit beer may be necessary.