Mulberries?

[gmr]

Just moved to a home with 3 very big mulberry trees. I'm guessing over the next month I can pull a fair amount of fruit off these trees (I guess I'd have to freeze them along the way). So, I'm think Mulberry wheat. Should I go by the raspberry standards of how much fruit I need? I'm thinking somewhere between 5-8 lbs. How about when to introduce them to the beer? Some or all after the boil (this would also pasteurize them, yes?) or just rack the beer into primary on top of the berries? Will a 6 gallon carboy hold 5 gallons of liquid and enough berries to impart color and some flavor to the beer? I'm guessing 5lbs. is about 20 cups, but that's a pretty uneducated guess! Any advice or insight? Thanks! Greg

 

[FSR402]

I have one of these trees in my yard also and was thinking of doing the same thing.
:rockin:

 

[Evan!]

While I'm a longtime mulberry lover, they really aren't the most flavorful berry out there. I personally doubt that you're going to get a whole lot of flavor imparted on the beer from even 20 cups of berries. Color, no doubt, but flavor, probably not much.

 

[Moonpile]

I think pairing it with a wheat beer sounds good.

If you're looking for other uses, Morat is not a knock off of a Sascha Baron Cohen character but a traditional mead made with mulberries, a subset of Melomel.

I've never made one, but it's on my list if I can find some mulberries!

 

[chthonik]

We did a strawberry hefeweizen with good results; we racked the finished beer onto the berries in secondary, let it sit for 5 days, and then bottled. I'd think this is probably a good process for any similar fruit, since the delicate flavors and aromas don't get boiled off. We used a 6.5 gallon (possibly larger) plastic fermentation bucket with a spigot for the secondary, and draine dthe beer out right through the spigot, leaving the strawberries in the bucket.

Wheats seem to be good for fruit beers because they are done quickly and complement the fruit flavors nicely. Mulberry wheat sounds awesome, especially with fresh handpicked berries!

With mulberries, I'd probably try gently rinsing the berries, then quickly sanitizing them, maybe in a colander dipped into sanitizer (me and my buddies use Star San). The sanitizer seemed to eat away at our berries a little bit, so we didn't keep the fruit in the sanitizer long.

We quartered the strawberries, but since that won't work with mulberries, maybe gently crushing them before racking the beer onto them. We didn't puree to make it easy to get the beer off the berries, and we got almost all of the beer off them when we bottled.