Blackberry Ale - Looking for critique

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bradleypariah

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We live in Oregon, where blackberries literally grow like weeds. I have about 15 lbs of hand-picked yard berries to make a beer with right now, and it's all currently frozen. I am tasked with making something sweet like cider, but I want to put my own twist on it.

Here's what I was thinking of doing for a 5-gallon batch:
14 lbs Great Western Northern Two-Row, BIAB mash at 152° F to ensure there are both fermentable and unfermentable sugars. No idea on time, I'll just test with iodine until it's over.
15-minute boil for sterilization.
0.25 oz of whole-leaf Citra at flame out (as a floral, non-bittering preservative only), chill, pitch yeast, ferment to resting gravity, whatever that may be, however long that might take.

Bring 10 lbs of crushed blackberries to 150° F to pasteurize, then chill to 75° F.
This should yield a little over a gallon of pulp.
Pour into a fresh carboy, then rack ale onto blackberry mush.

I'm hoping this will trigger a secondary fermentation, and I will taste the progress daily with a thief.
Before all the blackberry sweetness is gone, rack to another carboy with potassium sorbate (unless you think I can just pour it in?), then allow to rest for a day, then refrigerate the carboy for a few days to drop as much protein out of suspension as possible before kegging.

I want the blackberry to be extremely obvious, and to have an overall sweet product.

Any thoughts? I appreciate your time.
 
I'd go a little heavier on the hops or lighter on the malt, or you might have a very sweet final product. A lack of balance between hops and malt, and all those berries and all. I'd find hops that compliment the blackberries, like maybe el Dorado or something with a stone fruit character. Maybe heull melon
 
Sure thing. I make a lot of experimental brews involving fruit, honey, grain, hops, cocoa beans, vanilla, oak, etc... I love to create braggots, meads, ciders and fruit beers. I've experimented a lot with local fruit, including peaches from my backyard. I'd say that looks like a great recipe! Should be very tatsy. I'd keep the hop addition down low still and add them at 20 minutes before flameout, given what you are going for. I've done this with many of my fruit-heavy beers. No real perceivable bitterness, but just enough to round out the sweetness a little. I'd shoot for about 15 IBU's or so.

Let me know what the final recipe winds up looking like, and how it comes out!
 
So, I just wanted to come back and add some insight to this recipe. I took the advice here and upped my Citra addition to .5 oz at flame out. This ale is nearing four months old now, I never did add the potassium sorbate, and it finished quite dry. I essentially made blackberry wine, and it can be enjoyed "still" as-is, but it's potent. I don't remember what yeast I used, but it was an ale yeast, which, if I were to make this recipe again, I would change. Perhaps a wine yeast or a champagne instead.

The pulp of the blackberries stole about 1.5 gallons worth of space in the carboy, and it was too thick to get through keg pins, so that had to go down the drain, which felt like a shame. Not sure how to avoid that. I wound up with about 3.5 drinkable gallons of high-alcohol wine. I was able to stratify the liquid and pulp by putting the carboy directly into our basement fridge for two days.

I racked the blackberry wine to a corny keg, then turned this into a cider by backsweetening.
I racked one gallon of UV-only pasteurized apple cider, fresh from the farm, on top of the wine.
The apple taste rounds this out to quite a nice blackberry cider. I force carbed a liter of the stuff with our SodaStream, and am carbing the keg now. I drank almost the whole liter last night, and I was blissfully floating around the house before bed. When my wife got home, I gave her the rest, and she congratulated me. LOL Dudes. She ___ .... ____ congratulated. Me. LOL :D She usually hates my beer. She hates beer period, and I love making NEIPAs. I made something that both she and I think is delicious.
 
I am sure you probably have already brewed this but for me I would be picking a totally different hop. Citra for me just screams the wrong hop. But that's just me.

For this beer I personally would be using El Dorado to maintain that sweetness form the fruit.

Cheers
Jay
 
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