Hi All,
I am looking at making a strawberry flavoured beer. And maybe adding a slight chocolate flavour to the beer aswell by adding cacao nibs in the secondary.
For a 20L batch, how much strawberries do you recommend? And how much cacao nibs? I have read that it is best to add both to the secondary.
Is there anything i need to do to the strawberries/cacao nibs before using them (i.e. boiling, or soaking in vodka?)
Thanks,
Tim
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Adding Fruit to beer
Many brewers have experimented with adding fruit to their beers. The most commonly added fruit to beer is raspberries, but many others have been tried at some point or another. Depending on what fruit you use, and what base beer you use, you will need a decent amount of them- a 20L batch will generally need at least 1kg worth of fruit for a flavour change that is noticeable.
If you want to add them in Primary, it would be best to wash the fruit in cold water first to get rid of the majority of surface crap, then cool the wort to 70-80C and use a hop-bag to dunk the cherries in for 2mins. Once this is done, put them in a sealed container while the wort no-chilled overnight and then dump the cherry bag in the fermenter and rack the wort in on top. However, adding the fruit to primary is believed to 'scrub' a lot of fruit flavour, so it is not recommended.
Putting the fruit into secondary is largely considered to be the better way to have best extraction of the fruit flavours. Before putting them into the fermenter, wash them in cold water then pasteurise at 80C for 1min, or use a Sodium Met. solution to sanitise.
Below is a quick list of do's and dont's of using fruit in a batch of beer-
- DON'T boil, you'll lose all your fruity goodness and risk leaching pectic acid into your wort, causing a haze in the final beer.
- DON'T pulp. Don't bother - This will just make it harder to rack your beer off the fruit. See "Freezing" below.
- DON'T use in primary, you'll ferment-out all your flavour and aroma.
- DO sanitise in water at 80C for 1min or 70C for 2mins. Use a hop-sock or muslin wrap to allow the hot-water to touch all the fruit. Using a zip-lock bag is mostly pointless.
- DO freeze your fruits for a few days or weeks before you use it. This will break-down the cell membranes and make the fruitiness easier to extract into your beer.
- DO use in secondary.
- DO use a sediment reducer in your fermenter, if only so your fruit bits don't clog your tap-hole.
If you're worried about pectic haze, you can use a pectic enzyme to break-down the acid. Should be available from your LHBS.
Don't bother with strawberries - you need a truck-load of them to make any impression on the beer. Or alternatively buy a large box of 'jamming' strawberries from a market.
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Got this off the net and go by these methods often with no problems!
Unless your making a wheat beer i wouldn't worry about strawberries imo, I just made a red ale with 100g cocoa and 0.5kg of cherries
and it turned out awesome. Can post the recipie if you want..
So preferably i would add cherries or raspberries to your beer because you won't have to add anywhere near as much and do about the same thing.
Drew
