Fruit: To boil or not to boil...

[Green and Dumb]

Getting ready to make a an Orange Cranberry Ale for Thanksgiving/Xmas time and I'm confused as to how to utilize the fruit. I am using a recipe I found in The Brewmaster's Bible (Thanksgiving Cranberry Ale, p.349) as the basis for my beer and making some changes (Sweet Orange peel, 1lb of honey, etc) to it. Now, this recipe calls for 2lbs fresh cranberries and recommends adding the chopped cranberries to the boil for the final 30 minutes, but I have found a lot of posts on here that recommend NOT boiling the fruit and, instead, steeping it for a bit, freezing it, and then adding to secondary.

What will be the difference if I boil rather than adding to secondary? Will it be more bitter? Will the beer be hazier? I added the honey to the recipe to balance out some of the cranberry bitterness so I'm wondering if adding them only to secondary will work?

 

[david_42]

Cranberries are more like gravel than fruit, chop finely and put them in the boil. Blackberries and such, benefit from freezing.

 

[runhard]

My experience has been that some fruit are very high in pectin which can cause problems when boiled and some fruit skins are high in tannins which can be leached in the boil.

 

[casebrew]

I think concensus is freeze first, then pasturise at 140-170 degress like 15 minutes. Smash with potato masher, cool, and add to fermenter. Expect blow-off when skins clog bubbler.

I've done two batchs of fruity stuff so far, boiled both for just a couple minutes, no hazeiness. Different fruits have different pectin contents. I thick a jelly making site may discuss which fruits would need more pectin added, so those fruits could be boiled?

 

[ultraplop]

Tart apples, sour blackberries, crabapples, cranberries, currants, gooseberries, Eastern concord and wild grapes, lemons, loganberries, plums (except Italian) and quinces are examples of fruits that contain enough natural pectin and acid (if not overripe) to gel with only added sugar. Apricots, blueberries, cherries, figs, peaches, pears, pineapple, Italian prunes, raspberries, rhubarb and strawberries are low in pectin. Commercially canned or frozen fruit juices also are low in pectin. Combine low-pectin fruits with one of the high-pectin fruits or a commercial pectin.

Taken from: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/Pubs/foodnut/09303.html

It also says that the riper the fruit the less pectin it has.

edit: another thing it mentioned is that most of the pectin is usually in the skins and cores

 

[Green and Dumb]

Ok, so since most of these responses weren't in prior to my brewing yesterday, I went ahead and followed the recipe and boiled the cranberries (in muslin bags) in the wort for 30 minutes of the boil. The wort looked and smelled very nice....nice deep red color. I cooled the wort, added to cold tap water in the primary, as I always do, and then aerated the wort and pitched in my WLP011 European Ale Yeast at 73 degrees. That was yesterday @ 6pm.

Today, as of 6:40 pm, I have ZERO activity in my airlock. The temp of the primary is 67 degrees and the WL vial says that the wort should stay above 70 until fermentation begins. This is my first time using WL yeast so I'm wondering if this much time normally passes before seeing any activity. I didn't make a starter...just took it out of the fridge ~4 hours before it was pitched into the wort. Should I be worried about this batch? Did boiling the cranberries cause some problem that is hampering fermentation?

 

[ultraplop]

Boiling the cranberries wouldn't cause problems in the fermentation. Did you make a yeast starter? if you don't use one sometimes the lag time can be quite long, possibly up to 48 hours.

Another likely cause of no airlock activity is if the fermenter isn't sealed completely and the co2 gas is taking a different route out of there instead of the airlock.

As long as you pitched at a good temp (70-80 degrees) then you should be fine unless you have a bad batch of yeast. If you are really concerned you can open it up and take a quick peek and see if there is any krausen. If there is no krausen after a couple days I would get worried and repitch.

Also, I didn't mention in the other post, with the pectins you can also get fining agents or pectin enzyme that will take care of any haze, possibly at a homebrew shop.