Brewing with Concord grapes?

[BrewingUponLugano]

Has anyone tried this?

I live in southern Switzerland on the Italian border and as you can imagine wine is king around here. However, the craft brewing scene has been developing before our eyes over the last 5 years since we've been here.

Having grapes easily available, I had been wondering what would a beer refermented on grapes taste like. Today while I was in a wine shop, low and behold, what do I see? One of the new local microbreweries has released a beer made with "uva americana" or american grapes, aka Concord grapes.

The beer is quite refreshing and overall a nice attempt at what I had been imagining. The label states only that it contains malt and wheat while being hopped with Magnum and Saaz. It also states it was fermented at high temperature. It is 9.1% but you wouldn't know it. Very clean. Light rose color. Great bouquet of Concord to the nose. The beer is dry but malty with nice fruit at the end, they did it well because it isn't jelly at the finish which was one of my concerns.

So my questions:

Would you use a beer yeast on the wort? And then rack onto the grapes?

Or would you just throw the grapes into the wort and let the natural yeast on the grape skins (which there is tons of) do the job?

I would have thought they used a lager yeast and fermented at low temp, then refermented on the grapes because the bouquet is so nice. But Concord grapes are very strong in flavor, so maybe throwing them in from the beginning mellows it out.

Any suggestions and/or experience?

 

[ArkotRamathorn]

I would use a beer yeast, preferably a robust one like a saison or a belgian strain but I am partial to Belgian/French strains. Ferment the beer like normal and transfer onto the crushed grapes, the fermentation will kick back up once the simple sugars from the grapes get mixed in. The yeast on the skin of the grapes might start to do some work so you'll wanna treat it like a sour/bacteria, keg if you can (I have a strawberry/rhubarb wheat ale that is getting dangerously carbonated so it's time to drink it up quick).

It would be interesting to just transfer the wort on top of crushed grapes and let it all go to town to see what happens. If theres bacteria/bugs on the skin those should take care of the complex sugars normally found in wort and the "wine" yeast on the skins should take care of the simple sugars. If it ferments very dry though it'll start to taste more like wine than beer with wine.