First Fruit Beer

[DuffManMississippi]

me and my brewing partner are doing an american wheat ale and we want to rack onto cherrys now i read some of the debate about cooking the fruit first and then the argument that you dont have to do that because of the alcohol already in the beer ,(we added alcohol booster anyways.) well my plan is to freeze 4 to 5 pounds of fresh cherrys thaw them a week later and puree them and put them in a sanitized carboy and rack the beer on top of them, leave it for ten days and then this is where i get confuse do i the beer again after the fruit settles and do i use a screen to filter all the cherry crap out?

 

[Stuntman]

Rack the beer off the top, the fruit will take several days (3 or so) to fall out. Then seven more days the fruit will start to compact so that you can get a decent amount of beer.
I have done maybe five batches, pumpkin, cherries, peaches/walnuts. After asking several members, and doing side research, I decided to juice the fruit, add back the pulp and put into zip lock freezer bags, and freeze. Day that I went to the secondaries, I simply heated them up to a sterilizing temp for fifteen minutes or so, and put them on top of the wort when going into secondaries.

Things I learned:
1) Freezing breaks down cell walls for more aroma/flavor.
2) Only put the fruit in AFTER the initializing fermentation is done (don't want to blow all the goodness out the airlock).
3) Boiling helps reduce the chance of getting wild yeast into the fermenter making off flavors.


Hope this helps.

 

[Fid]

Racking off of fruit is definitely a pain. I racked a beer onto a bunch of frozen mixed berries... had never been so aware of how many tiny seeds are in those things! They mucked up my racking cane and I had to restart my siphon at least 5 times. I would think cherries should be a little bit easier but if possible I'd definitely recommend cold crashing the hell out of the thing before transferring out of secondary. Should help the fruit pieces clump up at the bottom and make for a slightly easier transfer to bottle/keg.

 

[Stuntman]

Racking off of fruit is definitely a pain. I racked a beer onto a bunch of frozen mixed berries... had never been so aware of how many tiny seeds are in those things! They mucked up my racking cane and I had to restart my siphon at least 5 times. I would think cherries should be a little bit easier but if possible I'd definitely recommend cold crashing the hell out of the thing before transferring out of secondary. Should help the fruit pieces clump up at the bottom and make for a slightly easier transfer to bottle/keg.

Yeah I agree, back then I wasn't cold crashing, now I cold crash every time I have room, except for the Wheat Beers, Fruit added Wheat Beers will be cold crashed to save more beer (good point Fid). Glad you mentioned berry problems, I have never done berries. If I do I will probably do the Jack La lane Juicer, omit putting pulp back in, and use the screen in the funnel trick. Doing it that way you would probably need a lot of berries, since no pulp/skin to obtain flavor.

 

[gomb]

Tie a 5 gallon paint strainer to the end of your autosiphon/racking cane and it will go alot easier on you.