Best Styles for Strawberries

Ingredients
1

I hit the local self-pick farm this weekend and scored a lot of strawberries, and after cleanup, dehusking, and pie making / shortcake eating, I have 11lbs of chopped strawberries and juice in the freezer. So what do I brew? I’m tending towards a lighter brew like a blonde or wheat to showcase the fruit. I know strawberry is mild and drops off fast. My plan is to rack to the strawberries in secondary but hold it at 40F in the kegerator so I don’t ferment out all the flavor.

So any suggestions from those who do fruit beers more often?

2

A wheat beer base with American wheat yeast is hard to beat for a straight forward beer - it’s a nice canvas for the fruit that complements it IMO.  Past that, a sour or lambic is nice but obviously pretty time consuming.

3

Thanks HoosierBrew! I just moved to Indy! Where do you recommend for the local beer scene?

4

Awesome !

Broad Ripple:

Broad Ripple Brewpub- it’s the first brewpub in the state and still great. Owned by a British guy, so good British ales and food. Great atmosphere.

Brugge Brasserie - A Belgian gastropub. Great beer and food. Mussels and frites with their Tripel is sublime.

20 Tap - A beer bar with outstanding stuff on tap that you don’t see very often.

Mass Ave District:

Chatham Tap - A British soccer pub. Good taps and food. Cool place to relax.

MacNiven’s - A Scottish pub. Nice beer selection. Another cool atmosphere.

There’s a good start !

EDIT - Should’ve added the LHBS, Great Fermentations, on E 65th. Excellent shop, been around almost 20 years, great selection and staff. They host Big Brew day every year and are right next door to a really good nano, Bier Brewery. Maybe I’ll bump into you there sometime. Any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Cheers !

5

Blonde or wheat for sure. Go easy on the hops and only add a bittering addition. Maybe 10ibu

Edit - bag the strawberries or use a dip tube screen or else you will clog the dip tube and poppet with strawberry sludge.

6

Good call on the bag. I use purees now and didn’t think of it.

7

BYO has an article on this very question this month.  They recommend blonde or wheat as your base.

I used to make a Strawberry Ale that was very good.  It was a simple light pale ale with a minimum of hops.  I think I used WLP001 to keep the yeast character to a minimum and really let the strawberries shine through.

Paul

8

The two best strawberry beers I have had were both milk stouts.

9

I’m going to nominate shortcake. Don’t mean to be difficult.

10

+1.  Strawberry’s flavor and aroma tends to not come across well in beer, for whatever reason. And also, strawberry shortcake kicks @$$.

11

Melomel?

12

+1 - but even in a Melomel you need a LOT of strawberries to get the flavor to come across. I made a batch of melomel last year with almost 9 pounds of strawberries in a 2-gallon batch (half in primary and half in secondary), and I still think it needed more.

If you’re going to use it in a beer I’d recommend a saison or lambic. I feel that you need some aciditiy to make the strawberry flavor stand out.

13

American amber ale or ESB seem to suit strawberries really well.