Quandong Aussie Ale

[jeremy]

Hey all,

I spent the weekend back on my family farm and picked up a whole heap of "wild peaches" as we used to call them, I love this fruit. Quite mealy flesh, reasonably sour/bitter, but with a big variation between different fruits. They are good to eat fresh, but a completely different beast when briefly stewed with a little bit of sugar, still quite tart, but make a nice ruby red syrup.

Anyway, to the point. I decided to take a punt and took a half kilo of the fruit (stone removed), stewed it for about 10 minutes with around 100gms of sugar, allowed it to cool overnight, and put the whole lot in a 22 litre Aussie Pale Ale, 5 minutes prior to flame-out.

I dont have the recipe handy, but it was pretty simplistic, hoping to get flavour and aroma from the fruit, it was roughly:

5kg JWM Trad
0.2kg Wheat
0.05kg Crystal

25gm POR 60min
20gm POR 10min
0.5kg Wild Peaches, stewed 5min
(around 35IBU)

US05

I have seen a lot of people trying to use Australian ingredients (wattleseed and the like) but I dont think I have ever seen anyone use Quandongs before. Do people think this could be a winner or have I made a mistake?

I threw it on a yeast cake of US05 last night and will check in on it tonight. The only thing I have noticed out of the ordinary so far is that it is very cloudy, and didnt seem to break like other beers. Is this typical with adding fruit?

Cheers all!

Jeremy.

 

[Tahoose]

Not sure if I would have stewed them? Normally if using fresh fruit you would place the fruit in a secondary and rack semi fermented beer onto the the fruit.

Will be a wait and see thing I think.

 

[TimT]

Yeah I'd normally go with a non-stewing method to get more of the fruit character. But it's definitely a good way to knock any infection issues on the head. Don't think I've ever even eaten quandongs - though the Baron at the moment is trying to encourage me to make a loquat beer or wine.

 

[jeremy]

Yeah, fair enough.

Flavour is a little subtle when the fruit is raw, and its a pretty difficult fruit to clean (if you have seen a lot of them you would know what I mean). So I thought stewing would release more flavour and aroma, and would help to control any issues with infection.

I could always grab some more fresh ones and rack onto them in secondary...

 

[mfeighan]

I would have vacuum sealed them and sous vide them for a while to kill off anything without dramatically changing the flavours. I remember doing that for a raspberry wheat beer a LONG time ago after reading a post about it somewhere. Not really my cup of tea though, however my female friends loved it.

 

[HBHB]

Yeah, fair enough.

Flavour is a little subtle when the fruit is raw, and its a pretty difficult fruit to clean (if you have seen a lot of them you would know what I mean). So I thought stewing would release more flavour and aroma, and would help to control any issues with infection.

I could always grab some more fresh ones and rack onto them in secondary...

Add a teaspoon of Pectinase to the mix for every 5kg of fruit, dissolved into a cup of pre-boiled water (allowed to cool). That will resolve the pectin haze issue and let the yeasties into the pulp to do their thing at secondary.

Martin

 

[TimT]

I've used fruit in brewing from time to time. Lemon peel, orange peel, kumquats, etc. I can only think of one serious infection issue (an acetobacteria or something like that got into one of my meads - and that's because I was somewhat foolishly attempting to do a wild yeast ferment without adequate preparation). One of the kumquats I bottled in home-made elderflower wine for a while to make a weird kumquat-and-tagetes ale. That one is actually improving as it ages, I think. The best protection against infection will be an active yeast and a relatively high alcohol content.

Mind you, fruit stews can be absolutely *delicious* and if used right could taste utterly brilliant in a brew, so who am I to say?

 

[Rieewoldt]

Have wanted to have a crack at wild peaches in beer, my parents are from SA and we used to have them all the time as kids and have always been curious to know how they'd go in beer? are you drinking this yet?