Fruit Beers

This chat is all about brewing with fruit. Fruit contributes to some nice complexity in your beer, but also involves some special tricks for producing the best looking beer.

The Basics
First off, canned and fresh fruit both have lots of fermentable sugars. Combined with malt extract, a beer can be produced which has the body and flavor of beer, as well as the color, aroma, and flavor of the fruit. Most fruits ferment out quite far (we say they ‘ferment dry’ or ‘attenuate highly’).

If you are using canned fruits, such as our Oregon Fruit Products fruits, you will have both natural fruit sugars (fructose) and cane sugar (sucrose) present. This will ferment out fairly dry, so we don’t generally recommend adding additional cane sugar.

If you want to build alcoholic strength without producing an overly thin, possibly cidery beer, use a can of unhopped malt extract to replace each 1½ cups of cane sugar or 2 cups of Booster that you might otherwise use. A little bit of honey might be nice, but don’t over do it.

A good recipe for a fruit beer is one can of Beer Mix, one can of unhopped malt extract, and one can of fruit. Typically, additional hops will only have a trace effect on flavor due to the dominance of the fruit.

Many of you are fortunate enough to be able to obtain fresh fruit from a local farm stand, grocery, or your own back yard. These fruits, however, will possess wild yeasts that will probably cause a slow, uncontrollable fermentation leading to overpressurized bottles. To use fresh fruit, heat up your 6 cups of water to boiling, add the fruit (which you’ve first coarsely chopped), and leave the pot on simmer for at least 15 minutes. This is essential to eliminating souring yeasts that come with fresh fruit.

Use 1 to 1½ pounds of fresh fruit for a nice beer, but give it several weeks to ferment and settle out before bottling. If you have two fermenters, you can ‘rack’ (transfer) the beer from one fermenter to another, thus leaving behind extra fruit pulp that may interfere with a clearer final product. Some fruity trub will come over, but most will be left behind. You will always experience a loss of total beer volume when you rack.

A third choice is to use frozen fruit juice concentrate. These beers are fun to experiment with because you can find so many odd fruit combinations in the grocery store. Start by adding one large can of concentrate to your initial 4 quarts of cold water in the fermenter when brewing. Cranberry and tropical fruit blends work well (try the latter with 1 teas. Freshly grate ginger).

Troubleshooting
Sometimes we hear from a Mr. Beer customer who has encountered cloudy beer fruit beer. This haze is caused by pectin, a natural protein found in most fruits. It is the same substance that helps jellies and jam gel, but in a beer, it shows up as a cloudiness we call ‘turbidity.’

Occasionally, people who are bottling complain of too much fruit pulp in the bottles. The best way to deal with this is to allow the beer ample time to settle in the fermenter. Fruit pulp is floaty and can harbor bubbles of carbon dioxide, which makes the fruit more buoyant. Settling take much longer than with a plain beer. You may have to wait four weeks of more for adequate settling. Take note: fruit beers in Belgium may remain ‘on the fruit’ for one to two years.

If you have any further questions about brewing with fruit, or if you have created a great fruit beer recipe, be sure to let me know by emailing. I can be reached at brewmaster@mrbeer.biz

 

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