How much puree to add to beer

One way to pasteurize your fruit is to add it to your brew kettle as your wort cools. If you do this too soon i. However, this method of pasteurizing fruit tends to lead to a less robust fruit flavor in the finished beer. So, we recommend using a second method: pasteurizing the fruit and adding it during secondary fermentation. To do this, put your mashed up fruit into a medium saucepan and add a little water.

Hold it at this temp for minutes. Wait until the primary fermentation is nearly complete. If you take a hydrometer reading and it's around 1. If you don't have a hydrometer, wait until you're seeing 5 bubbles per minute coming out of the airlock. Then, add the fruit and wait for primary fermentation to complete. This is definitely the easiest method of using purees and is the method that we recommend. After primary fermentation is complete, clean and sanitize your secondary fermentor as you normally would.

Then pour the fruit puree into the secondary fermentor using a sanitized funnel and siphon your beer on top of the fruit. The sugars in the fruit will be fermented, and this will cause a minor spike in airlock activity during the initial days of secondary fermentation. Then place a funnel into the neck of your carboy, and pour the fruit puree in. Now just siphon your beer on top of the fruit, add your airlock or blowoff tube if you think there may be a risk of it bubbling over , and wait.

At this time you may choose to rack it off the fruit, or you can bottle or keg it. There are a couple of benefits to using frozen fruit. The second is that freezing the fruit ruptures the cell walls, and allows the fruit to mush up and release its flavors into the beer more rapidly. Fresh fruit is a little more difficult to use because there is a lot of preparation that needs to be done prior to adding it to your beer. First of all, it will need to be mashed up, try using a potato masher or a food processor.

Then the fruit will need to be pasteurized to kill off any unwanted yeasts or bacteria. There are a couple ways to do this. This may release the pectins in the fruit which will make for a mess in your fermenter and a hazy beer.

That should allow enough time for the fruit to be pasteurized. This requires pasteurizing the fruit before its added to the secondary. To do this, put your mashed up fruit into a medium saucepan and add a little water. Hold it at this temp for minutes, and you should be good. All Rights Reserved. Shopping Cart Shopping Cart View cart. Beer Starter Kits. Recipe Kits. Top Taps. If you are using fresh fruit some brewers add it without any precautions and in most cases, this will be fine.

There is alcohol present from the initial fermentation that will make it hard for any bacteria to survive in the beer. That being said I occasionally like to pasteurize the fruit I use. If you are putting the skins of the fruit of something like plums or grapes, the skin is covered with wild yeast that will try to establish itself in the beer.

If the beer is of lower alcohol content then this pasteurising process will be a good idea and avoid any potential spoiling. If you are adding the fruit to the fermenter then you will want to think of it like dry hopping a beer. You need to leave the fruit in the fermenter for long enough for the flavour and aroma to infuse.

The alcohol in the beer acts as a solvent stripping the colour and flavour from the fruit, the yeast will ferment the sugars. I always leave fruit in the fermenter for at least 7 — 10 days in most cases to allow the yeast to break down the sugars and plenty of time for the flavours to infuse. It is also worth mentioning that some fruit floats so making sure they are submerged by either weighing down the bag that contains them or stirring daily may be necessary.

The pH of fermented beer is acidic enough to inhibit off most bacteria. This along with the alcohol content is usually enough to keep wild yeasts and bacteria out. Take your fresh fruit and prepare it ready to add to the fermenter.

I usually mash the fruit and break it down a bit. Some fruits are fine just by chopping or slicing them into smaller pieces. The whole thing can then simply be taken out. Simply racking the beer off the fruit with a syphon and racking cane into a clean fermenter will remove most of the solids.

Placing a small filter at the end of the syphon will also aid the process. If you are adding the fruit freely then cold crashing the beer will help to encourage particles to sink to the bottom of the fermenter before you syphon the beer off the top. Using fruit in homebrew will completely transform both the flavour and usually the colour depending on the type of beer.

Strawberries will turn a pale beer a magnificent red hue. Fruit does also add a small amount of protein and tannins that can affect clarity.

Conditioning the beer in bottles or kegs cold for a short time will help precipitate out some of the haze forming products. Use of Irish moss or protafloc in the boil will also reduce some of the chill haze. The benefits of course of adding fruit to your homebrew are the flavour and aroma enhancements.

Hopefully with a little experimentation and note taking you can achieve your own perfect fruit beer. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Welcome to Home Brew Answers. I hope you find what you are looking for here! Read More Here. Table of Contents. Leave a Reply Want to join the discussion? Feel free to contribute! Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

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