Fruit Beer Strawberry Alarm Clock v3.0 (Strawberry Blonde)
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The answers to these questions aren't really germane to the recipe. I have made this beer using several different mash and sparge techniques over the years, and I am pretty sure if you ask 10 people who have made this recipe how they did their mash, you'll get at least 5 different answers. It just depends on your equipment and process.
Yea that's what I figured I continuous sparged after boil I came out with roughly 4.5 g water. With a og of 1.055 . Looks and smells great .the yeast is going nuts, I have it in a 6g glad carboy it looks like there is a tornado going.in there lots of movement
Just fired up a batch of this on Saturday. My only mod was that I used some harvested 1056 that I had in my fridge. With the exception of learning that chilling with warmer summer tap water takes a little longer, everything went fine. Original gravity was 1.051 -- just .001 off the original recipe. Yeast has been doing its thing for three days now.
One question -- I do not have a plastic bucket fermenter. My plan is to just drop the berries directly into my glass secondary. Getting them in will be easy -- but getting them out will be the tricky part. I plan to quarter the strawberries to ease this process. Has anyone ever sliced up their berries a little smaller to get them out of a glass carbory?
Thanks,
Kevin
One question -- I do not have a plastic bucket fermenter. My plan is to just drop the berries directly into my glass secondary. Getting them in will be easy -- but getting them out will be the tricky part. I plan to quarter the strawberries to ease this process. Has anyone ever sliced up their berries a little smaller to get them out of a glass carbory?
Thanks,
Kevin
Magical idea just came to me. Since this beer accents the tart aspects of strawberries more than the sweet, I bet this beer would be amazing after some miracle berries.
If you have never tried them, they come in pill form that you dissolve on your tongue and it binds to your taste buds making tart things taste sweet. So you can bite into a raw lemon, and it will taste like lemonade. I've eat strawberries before with them and they are the most delicious things you will ever try. Think I have a few pills left, going to give it a whirl once this beer is done.
And for those interested, it's really cool to taste all sorts of things:
http://www.miracleberrypill.org/
If you have never tried them, they come in pill form that you dissolve on your tongue and it binds to your taste buds making tart things taste sweet. So you can bite into a raw lemon, and it will taste like lemonade. I've eat strawberries before with them and they are the most delicious things you will ever try. Think I have a few pills left, going to give it a whirl once this beer is done.
And for those interested, it's really cool to taste all sorts of things:
http://www.miracleberrypill.org/
![Craft A Brew - Safale S-04 Dry Yeast - Fermentis - English Ale Dry Yeast - For English and American Ales and Hard Apple Ciders - Ingredients for Home Brewing - Beer Making Supplies - [1 Pack]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41fVGNh6JfL._SL500_.jpg)
made an extract version and added 8 oz Honey Malt. used hand-picked ripe berries which were processed as listed. fantastic brew, intense aroma. took 3rd in fruit beers at the 2013 SNERHC. thanks for the recipe, will definitely brew another batch next summer!
It may be somewhere in the posts already, and I apologize if it is, but am I correct when I say you mash at 152 for 65 minutes, then raise the temp. to 168 for the final 10 minutes? Thanks in advance!
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Pretty sure it's just meaning a mashout
I brewed this a few weeks ago, and after adding the strawberries, the beer hasn't tasted tart at all. Comint out of the secondary, it's definitely got a berry taste to it, but it's been more of a old strawberry flavor, which is kind of a bummer. Hopefully the carbonation from the bottles will spruce it up a bit.
I'll post back later with my results in case anyone has a similar experience.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
I'll post back later with my results in case anyone has a similar experience.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
OP
OP
It should be fine. Maybe give it an extra week conditioning in the bottles, if you're really worried about it.
Echoloc8
Acolyte of Fermentalism
Hey, everyone, thought I'd post a post-mortem, given that it's been a good while.
The beer wound up very good, especially with some citric acid added to make it good and sharp. The process of extracting the cherries in vodka did dull the taste a bit.
Only issue is that the ABV is entirely out of whack. Original K-Rouge is 8% ABV, and this one wound up being north of 14%. I used 4 gals of base beer at 8% ABV + 1 gallon (!) of cherry liqueur at 40%-ish ABV = ((4 * 0.08) + (1 * 0.40))/5 = 14.4% ABV, which is way too high, but still damn tasty.
The liqueur is also good on its own (I had about a liter left over). It's very obviously natural cherry, nothing chemical or synthetic to it. It has a pretty heavy alcohol heat, though, which I'm glad was moderated by mixing with the beer.
If I make it again (and I may not; it's a lot of money to buy all those cherries and vodka, and has to be kegged instead of bottled to avoid bottle bombs, so it takes up a keg), I would experiment with a long steep of just the cherries in secondary, but I don't have any idea how it would work out. Someone mentioned kirschwasser in the thread; I honestly don't know how well it would work.
My wife, friends and I are about 2/3 of the way through the keg at this stage (it's not a guzzling beer at 14%, whew), so be ready for it to last and last if you try it.
Some other things i might try:
* Scaling the base beer down to 5 percent, and the liqueur to 20%. That would yield an 8% final beer at a 4:1 ratio, but I have no idea how that would affect the body, flavor, etc. of the result. The base would no longer be a Donker clone, that's for certain.
* Different cherries. The ones I used were Walmart bagged frozen. Some sharper variety, or fresher one, might have gotten me closer without needing the citric acid.
If anyone else tries the recipe, post about it!
-Rich
The beer wound up very good, especially with some citric acid added to make it good and sharp. The process of extracting the cherries in vodka did dull the taste a bit.
Only issue is that the ABV is entirely out of whack. Original K-Rouge is 8% ABV, and this one wound up being north of 14%. I used 4 gals of base beer at 8% ABV + 1 gallon (!) of cherry liqueur at 40%-ish ABV = ((4 * 0.08) + (1 * 0.40))/5 = 14.4% ABV, which is way too high, but still damn tasty.
The liqueur is also good on its own (I had about a liter left over). It's very obviously natural cherry, nothing chemical or synthetic to it. It has a pretty heavy alcohol heat, though, which I'm glad was moderated by mixing with the beer.
If I make it again (and I may not; it's a lot of money to buy all those cherries and vodka, and has to be kegged instead of bottled to avoid bottle bombs, so it takes up a keg), I would experiment with a long steep of just the cherries in secondary, but I don't have any idea how it would work out. Someone mentioned kirschwasser in the thread; I honestly don't know how well it would work.
My wife, friends and I are about 2/3 of the way through the keg at this stage (it's not a guzzling beer at 14%, whew), so be ready for it to last and last if you try it.
Some other things i might try:
* Scaling the base beer down to 5 percent, and the liqueur to 20%. That would yield an 8% final beer at a 4:1 ratio, but I have no idea how that would affect the body, flavor, etc. of the result. The base would no longer be a Donker clone, that's for certain.
* Different cherries. The ones I used were Walmart bagged frozen. Some sharper variety, or fresher one, might have gotten me closer without needing the citric acid.
If anyone else tries the recipe, post about it!
-Rich
Posting back with some results. Uncarbonated, the beer didn't taste tart at all. After carbonation, the beer was extremely tart (much too tart for the taste of my friends and I). Aroma still smelled like old strawberries. I'll let it rest in a closet for 6 months or so and periodically test it to see how it mellows.
Another interesting note is how the beer didn't settle very well in the bottles. The yeast made a compact cake on the bottom as usual, but there was a lot of material left floating along the walls of the bottle.
I think it's residual pieces of strawberry, and it settled onto the bottom after I stuck it in the fridge overnight. However, as soon as I popped the cap, the pieces came up in chunks with the CO2. It totally grossed out a guy who was trying my beer with me. I let it clarify for a few minutes before pouring, and it still came out a little chunky.
All in all, I'd consider this beer a good learning experience, but not something I'll try again. Oh well, I still made beer. Can't complain about that.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
Another interesting note is how the beer didn't settle very well in the bottles. The yeast made a compact cake on the bottom as usual, but there was a lot of material left floating along the walls of the bottle.
I think it's residual pieces of strawberry, and it settled onto the bottom after I stuck it in the fridge overnight. However, as soon as I popped the cap, the pieces came up in chunks with the CO2. It totally grossed out a guy who was trying my beer with me. I let it clarify for a few minutes before pouring, and it still came out a little chunky.
All in all, I'd consider this beer a good learning experience, but not something I'll try again. Oh well, I still made beer. Can't complain about that.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
OP
OP
You didn't post any details about your process, but that is why I put the strawberries inside a sealed fine mesh bag in a bucket for secondary, and then rack onto them.
At this point the beer is in the bottles already, so you aren't really going to be able to mess with it, but another strategy you can use, which is somewhat effective in my experience, is putting a filter on the output end of your tubing when racking from secondary to your bottling bucket. However, the best strategy is to not let all the little bits of strawberry get into the beer to begin with.
At this point the beer is in the bottles already, so you aren't really going to be able to mess with it, but another strategy you can use, which is somewhat effective in my experience, is putting a filter on the output end of your tubing when racking from secondary to your bottling bucket. However, the best strategy is to not let all the little bits of strawberry get into the beer to begin with.
Yeah, I put all my strawberries (frozen and halved) in a mesh bag into my secondary, and I didn't notice any of the floaters. I think the particles that gave it a cloudy appearance congealed and fell out of suspension.
Had I used gelatin finings to clarify my beer, I imagine this would have mitigated this cosmetic issue.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
Had I used gelatin finings to clarify my beer, I imagine this would have mitigated this cosmetic issue.
Sent from my spaceship in low orbit.
Racked to strawberries this past Friday. Quick question. I only wanted to put strawberries on half of the brew. So I racked 2.5 gallons onto strawberries and bottled the other 2.5. Think I made a mistake though. I have the 2.5 gallons plus strawberries in a 6.5 gallon bucket. It's been 4 days and I haven't seen any activity in the airlock. Have I completely screwed this up?!?!?
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OP
OP
I wouldn't worry about it at all.
OP
OP
I would think 1010 ought to work well, although it will be pretty clean compared to 1099. 1056 would be fine as well.
WestCoastBrewmonkey
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Did you follow the recipe as it was originally post on page 1?
randomgnarkill
Well-Known Member
I just pulled a sample of my strawberry alarm clock and I can't taste any strawberries yet. It's been about 13 days in the secondary. Did I do something wrong? The strawberries were float in the bag. I had put a pint glass with them to sink but there floating on top. Should I squeeze the bag of strawberries?
