Fresh fruit in my beer?

[Heff]

Hey gang,
I'm brand to to home brewing. I got a 1 gallon kit for Xmas and I'm getting ready for my third batch. I asked my wife to pick a brew she would like. So she picked a strawberry cream ale( American Amber). It calls for fresh strawberries to be added to the secondary as well as extract before bottling. My question is do I have worry about contamination from the berries not being boiled?

I would love to know thoughts or other ways to get the same effect.

 

[ASpeedyGTO]

Hi -

I did something very similar with fresh cut pineapple, and to be safe I decided to pasteurize it before putting it into the secondary. I steeped the fruit for 20 minutes in 150F water, then put into the secondary (making sure that everything it touched from there was sanitized, of course).

Pretty sure if it is the same for strawberries but my gut feeling says yes, you would need to pasteurize it first. I'd love to hear other's options too.

 

[Potamus]

Yeah pasteurization is your best bet. Some people just throw the fruit in, but it's easy to pasteurize so why take the chance? I would put the berries in the oven at 160 degrees for a little while though, instead of hot water. If you add them to water, you're going to lose a lot of the juice.

 

[jjw5015]

Either pasteurize them or soak in vodka

 

[bbohanon]

Only time I used fruit is in a Blonde Ale when I wheeled up 2 oranges and tossed them into the fermenter after primary fermentation completed.
Beer was awesome, I got alot of the orange taste into the beer and I did not pasteurize or anything like that.
I DID wash the outside of the orange and dipped it into some Star San before I wheeled it up.
Not sure if it helped, but I figured the grimy crap that would possibly infect the beer is more likely to be on the skin of the fruit, not inside it.
Doing it post fermentation also ensures the alcohol content in the beer helps to kill any other baddies.

Worked like a charm.

 

[Heff]

Thanks everyone for the info. I'll let you all know how it came out.