Stopping fermentation for my fruit beer?

[Jedsterr]

Hello all Well they say get all of your silly questions out of the way first so here goes.

Being new to brewing yet impatient and eager to try new beer experiments I have decided to attempt a version of a strawberry wheat beer! Now this is by no means going to be a complex brew as I am still at the kit stage of brewing and will be starting off with a standard wheat beer kit, but I wanted to ask a question about adding fruit to the secondary. I have read some amazing posts on here about how to add strawberries to your brew and the general idea I get is to add them to the brew at the secondary fermentation stage.

I am however hearing lots of reports that after the yeast gets to work on the sugar in the strawberries you are left with a rather tart taste rather than the sweet fruit taste I crave. So I was wondering if anyone has added strawberries to there batch at the secondary stage but arrested the yeast activity to give the fruit time to infuse into the beer? is this possible/advisable and how would you do it?

(I understand that Campden tablets can be used to stop yeast but would rather use a more natural method if anyone has one)


Cheers chaps

 

[COLObrewer]

Campden tablets will not stop an active fermentation, they can however be used to keep a complete fermentation from starting up again, that being said, there are some other things that go along with that, for instance you want to keep it cold and still, this won't be happening if you're adding fruit in secondary.

What you need here are some unfermentable sugars, you may want to steep some crystal malts during brewing or add some sort of unfermentable sweetener or lactose to the brew.