I'm tackling a partial old ale and I've seen various recipes that have included chopped raisins to the boil towards the end. I was after people's opinion on this if they've tried it and the result. Sounds OK to me but might turn out shocking....
This was my experience exactly. I couldn't find any dried fruit without vegetable oil in it (not that I looked all that hard) so just went ahead with what I could get. There was no real negative effect in terms of head retention or anything, but as Warren says it basically just adds a bunch of sugar (70% by weight I believe.) I used 1kg of dried fruit in a 25L batch and you can't even taste it, but the ~700g sugar resulted in a rather dry beer, which wouldn't really help bring out the fruit flavours. As such, I'm not planning on bothering again.Realistically it's probably really only having the effect of adding extra sugar to the beer. Also be mindful that some dried fruits/raisins etc. Have been treated with vegetable oil IIRC. (I could be wrong). :unsure:
I've never tried it, but I would be worried about the laxative effect.
That would depend on when the fruit was added, of course.
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