Mango in secondary vs. end of boil

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worlddivides

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So, since my wife tends to really dislike a lot of sours (though it's the one overarching beer style where I can never tell whether she'll like something or not since sometimes she'll love an "accessible sour" and sometimes hate an "accessible sour" and sometimes love an over-the-top aged mouth-puckeringly sour beer that most people find unapproachable and sometimes hate it), I ended up deciding to add fruit to my Berliner Weisse since she seems much more likely to enjoy it that way. Originally I'd been planning on adding mango puree to secondary (in the same fermenter, of course) near the end of fermentation. I have a feeling that would give more fresh fruit character and would leave more mango flavor in the beer than putting the mango in primary. However, adding more fermentables in the secondary makes finding out the OG and FG more difficult since I'd have the OG without the mango, an FG where primary fermentation ended without mango, an FG/OG where primary fermentation ended with mango added, and then an FG with fermentation done, so it just seems like it'd be easier to add the mango puree 5 minutes or 1 minute before the end of the boil. Then again, just how important is it to know the exact ABV? I normally really want to know, but secondary might result in a better flavor. Also, just how different is the flavor of the mango when added at the end of the boil versus secondary? I've made beers with fruit in the boil and fruit in secondary, but they weren't the same beer or the same fruits so I could compare, so I really can't tell.

Here's the recipe:
Mango Berliner Weisse:

Water Chemistry Adjustments (added before mash):
Half a Campden tablet
2 grams calcium chloride (dihydrate)
4 grams gypsum (calcium sulfate)
2 grams canning salt (NaCl)
0.5 grams baking soda
4 grams lactic acid

Grain bill:
900 grams of Weyermann Pilsner Malt (50%)
900 grams of Weyermann Wheat Malt (50%)

Secondary:
500 grams of mango puree
(22% of total fermentables with Pilsner being 39% and Wheat Malt being 39%)

Mashed at: 65C for 1 hour

Other:
Servomyces - add last 10 minutes of boil
Whirlfloc - add last 5 minutes of boil

Hops:
10 grams of Hallertau Mittelfru (3.5% AA) for 60 minutes

Fermented with Lallemand WildBrew Philly Sour at 22-25C (71F-77F) for 2 weeks – Set controller to 75F?

Kegged, then carbonated to 2.7 CO2 levels.

Estimated results of:
SRM: 2.4
IBUs: 8
Original Gravity: 1.031
Final Gravity: 1.004
ABV: 3.57%
 
I personally don’t care all that much about getting the ABV right. Why does it matter? Apparent attenuation is enough to ensure reproducibility.

My vote would be to add the fruit in a hop-stand-like set-up. End the boil, cool to ~150 F, toss in the puree, and let it sit for 10 minutes or so before cooling further. You will have zero concerns about contamination, and retain more flavor than adding it in the boil.

I always liked my fruit-stand beers, though one or two judges did ding me for a cooked flavor. I moved to adding fruit in primary, well before fermentation was over, to minimize the effect of oxidation on the rest of the beer.

I also like a little bit of Citra in a mango beer. Hop stand is a good place to toss it in!
 
I personally don’t care all that much about getting the ABV right. Why does it matter? Apparent attenuation is enough to ensure reproducibility.

My vote would be to add the fruit in a hop-stand-like set-up. End the boil, cool to ~150 F, toss in the puree, and let it sit for 10 minutes or so before cooling further. You will have zero concerns about contamination, and retain more flavor than adding it in the boil.

I always liked my fruit-stand beers, though one or two judges did ding me for a cooked flavor. I moved to adding fruit in primary, well before fermentation was over, to minimize the effect of oxidation on the rest of the beer.

I also like a little bit of Citra in a mango beer. Hop stand is a good place to toss it in!
That hop stand-like idea is a really good one. I definitely think I'd like to do that much more than at any time in the boil.

My original recipe with no fruit used traditional noble hops, but when I decided to add mango, I initially changed the hops to 60 minutes of Centennial, then a hop stand of Citra and El Dorado, and then dry hopping with Citra and El Dorado at the same time the mango puree is added. And this also bumped up the IBU from 3-8 to something more like 20-30. In the end, I just thought I should probably go with a single low-IBU noble hop bittering addition this time and save the tropical hops for another time.
 
I switched from fresh and fruit purees to Amarettio Artiasian flavorings. There's "0" waste and it tastes like real fruit, and the last time I purchased them it was 16$ to flavor 7-10 gal.
I've looked into them before since I was interested in making another maple bacon beer and I was also interested in some of their other flavors, but they're unfortunately not an option as they only ship to the US, Canada, and France.
 
Heating or boiling fruit is how you set pectin that will never clear. Not to mention driving the aroma away.
I know that caring about not being able to properly measure gravity on something like this is just something I really should not care about, and in the past, I've mainly added fruit in secondary, which has been the most successful. Probably not just because of the lack of heat, but also because adding in secondary tends to leave more of the fruit flavor than if it'd been in primary. I still haven't decided, but it's basically down to either my initial plan of adding in secondary or Alex's idea of adding around 75C (167F) in a hop stand kind of situation while cooling the wort down. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.
 
I have two mango trees in my backyard (S. Florida). Mango goes really well with beer. I've made 10 5 gallon batches of mango beer. 3 IPA's, 5 Wheats, 1 sour, and one with Kveik. All were excellent, all were with fresh (previously frozen) fruit pureed with about a cup of vodka added to primary at the tail end of fermentation. One pound of fruit to one gallon of wort, so 6-8lbs for my volumes. The gravity of most fruit is less than the wort (due to high water content) so your abv will be less than without the fruit (I don't try to do that math). The vodka probably offsets that to some degree but also helps sterilize the puree. Others will pasteurize it to avoid infection.

In my experience, Philly Sour delivers a mild sour, I haven't measured the pH. The one sour I did with Mango I used L.plantarum with a great outcome but there is some variability. One final warning, mango is very fibrous, transfer from fermentor to keg can be challenging. I have the ability to dump fruit/trub prior to kegging. That helps a lot. I used a floating dip tube for my early mango beers because I had to do an open transfer to keg, the fibrous mango would clog the dip tube after settling. YMMV. Cheers! Rick.
 
I have two mango trees in my backyard (S. Florida). Mango goes really well with beer. I've made 10 5 gallon batches of mango beer. 3 IPA's, 5 Wheats, 1 sour, and one with Kveik. All were excellent, all were with fresh (previously frozen) fruit pureed with about a cup of vodka added to primary at the tail end of fermentation. One pound of fruit to one gallon of wort, so 6-8lbs for my volumes. The gravity of most fruit is less than the wort (due to high water content) so your abv will be less than without the fruit (I don't try to do that math). The vodka probably offsets that to some degree but also helps sterilize the puree. Others will pasteurize it to avoid infection.

In my experience, Philly Sour delivers a mild sour, I haven't measured the pH. The one sour I did with Mango I used L.plantarum with a great outcome but there is some variability. One final warning, mango is very fibrous, transfer from fermentor to keg can be challenging. I have the ability to dump fruit/trub prior to kegging. That helps a lot. I used a floating dip tube for my early mango beers because I had to do an open transfer to keg, the fibrous mango would clog the dip tube after settling. YMMV. Cheers! Rick.
I don't think I'll need to worry about that since I do closed transfers. I typically do some degree of cold crashing beforehand, and the siphon on my fermenter is about 2 liters above the bottom, so it generally prevents any visible yeast or hops getting into the keg, and it should be the same for any non-liquid fruit material in there.

I've used L. Plantarum on Berliner Weisses before (in fact, my favorite Berliner Weisse I've ever made was soured with L. Plantarum before then being brewed with a regular ale yeast), but I currently only have one system, and the benefit of Philly Sour is that I don't need to have separate systems for sours and for regular beers since Philly Sour does not contaminate.
 
Adding fruit is generally not going to affect your abv a significant amount. 500g of mango is about 3 cups, has 22-24g sugar per cup. So about 70g of sugar, or 1/3 cup. If this is a 1gal batch(?), that'll raise your OG by 0.005-0.007, or maybe 0.5% abv; probably on the lower end since you're also adding a bunch of water from it. If you're using a can puree, check the label for additional sugar added to calc this, as well as watching out for preservatives or other additives.

But really, it's not important to know abv at all, unless it's personally important to you. Knowing gravity is good to know when near the end of fermentation, but you can make beer without it. And you don't need OG to check when fermentation slows/stops.

We used to keep track of readings for abv to 1-2 decimals, but the formulas aren't that exact, we don't actually figure any wort correction factors, and refract/hydrometer readings don't always line up (OGs can be up to 0.004 different, finals sometimes off by 0.010 or more between actual hydro compared to what the corrected refract reading is), so now we generally round to nearest whole percent and go with that. Plus any secondary additions just make reconfiguring it all too much of a pain. Plus or minus 1% abv, no one really cares, close enough. I drink for flavor, not for abv.
 
If I remember correctly, without the mangos, the beer would be something like 3% ABV, but with the mangos it's around 3.5% ABV. 0.5% ABV is generally a pretty miniscule difference, but I do think it matters for low ABV beers like Berliner Weisses.

I'm still on the fence about whether to add it while cooling down the wort (though maybe around 50C instead of 70C to reduce the aromatics that would be blown off by the heat) or to add it in secondary (probably not after fermentation has ended but right at the tail end of fermentation when the gravity is maybe around 1.010 or so). Although not having accurate gravity readings does kind of irk me a little, I do think that adding it in secondary would probably result in a better flavor and also potentially more sourness from the Philly Sour.
 
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