![]() ![]() It’s an interesting question: Why would plants invest a lot of time and energy into growing something which another species will eat? The answer arises from what happens once a piece of fruit is eaten: An animal will go about its business, traveling into new areas and, as animals tend to do, defecating along the way. I’d like to start our discussion of fruit with a brief background on what fruit is and why flowering plants grow fruit in the first place. With this road-map ahead of us, let’s get started with an exploration of the characteristics that make fruit both an enticing and challenging ingredient within our sour beers. Finally, we will wrap up the article with a collection of topics related to fruited sour beers, such as filtration/separation methods, usage rates, and the practice of “second” fruiting. We will discuss sources of fruit, different ways fruit may be processed, as well as how to incorporate differing products into our blends. Additionally, we will cover general expectations regarding tannin, color, and flavor extraction from different types of fruit. We will cover the characteristics that define fruit as an ingredient, including ways to measure the impact an individual batch of fruit will have on both our blend’s total acidity and ABV. The goal of this article is to serve as a comprehensive guide for sour beer makers looking to blend with fruit. This may come as no surprise when we consider the whopping amounts of fruit that some sour beer styles can incorporate into their fermentations. Like this description, we will be borrowing a number of concepts from winemakers throughout this article. Winemakers refer to wines without enough acidity as flabby, and this same dull muddled fruit presentation tends to occur in beers without a supporting level of acidity. Most fruits are naturally acidic, and it is this fact that tends to make fruit flavors taste brighter and more natural in sour beers than the same fruits would taste in beers with a higher pH. But that’s the nature of brewing, we love to experiment, and in doing so we learn.Īlthough fruit can be incorporated into practically any style of beer, in my opinion, it really finds a special home in sour beers. ![]() In fact, as a young homebrewer, I remember those beers as being some of my tastiest batches! It’s actually a little comical to me now, that at a time when I still didn’t have a good grasp on recipe development, I was so eager to add even more ingredients to an already complex process. I know for a fact that if you looked back through my first 20 to 40 brew logs you would find an American wheat with blueberries, a kiwi pale ale, and a raspberry porter. Keeping with this tradition, it seems that it would be a rare homebrewer who has never experienced the urge to incorporate some type of fruit into one of their recipes. Fruit and beer have long had a relationship which extends through history to the earliest known fermented beverages. ![]()
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