Aging Belgian ales with secondary additives

[fattox]

Basically just gonna be chasing a bit of info. Doing a Belgian dark strong/quadrupel sort of beer soon for winter, but plan on taking some of it off into a 5L sherry/port keg and sitting it on some berries for 12 months.

Any recommendations on this? It'll basically be fermented out on a high gravity Trappist yeast, with 5 litres of the main batch split off to age for a while. Using d180 Candi syrup and some Belgian ale and pils malts, with undecided hops as yet. Probably something noble. The plan is to bring out something similar to what Brewdog did in Abstrakt 12 but not to actually aim for a clone.

Any feedback would be really appreciated!

 

[hoppy2B]

I don't have any experience with fruit beers but personally I would only sit the beer on the berries for a short time and then age it, or I would boil up the berries and use the liquid obtained thereby.

Reason being that I don't like having vegetable matter in with my beer because I tend to think its just rotting away. Fruit in stronger spirits is probably ok though.

 

[mje1980]

Plenty of fruit beers are done exactly that way. Rack your beer on top and let sit. 12 months may be a bit long, 3-6 is common for Belgian sours, or even just a few weeks is common for standard fruit beers.

A 5l sherry bottle won't fit a lot, the fruit takes up a lot of space. Google around and you should find tables for amount per litre of different fruit.