don’t cook them but do freeze them first to knock back the wild cirtters that might be present, you can pasturize them if you are worried but make sure not to get so hot you set the pectin.
you could do a belgian beer, something with brett if you are patient. or a stout would be good. Secondary is the right time to add them
ok, will do, but contamination/infection is not going to be and issue, after one week of primary before fruit addition?
I just get paranoid about that, and this will be my first fruit. (i like to do “hop teas” instead of pure dry hop to counter my paranoia of contamination, so I’m paranoid as it is, b/c I have had one instance of contamination in my homebrewing career to date, and it came from a secondary addition(I think))
Seems like maybe you’re adding the fruit too soon. I’ve never found adding unpasteurized fruit to be a problem. The alcohol content and low pH of the beer makes it pretty resistant to infection.
Re: pits. I recall hearing/reading somewhere that cherry pits can be a source of cyanide. You might want to remove the pits.
I don’t wish to encourage anyone to poisen themselves but I can’t imagine that it’s that much of a problem. Many cherry lambics are aged on whole cherries for months and years! and mahreb is ground up cherry pits and that is eaten. where as these pits are just gonna sit in the beer for a coupel of weeks probably.
I know I saw somewhere that in order to get a toxic dose of cyanide from apple seeds one would have to eat liek a cupfull a day for several weeks. (don’t quote me on that)
If they are sour pie cherries, I made a very tasty American wheat with 5 pounds of Monteccero (sp?) cherries added after fermentation was over. It was very tasty, moderate sour cherry flavor, very east drinking.
5 pounds is enough to make about 1.5 to 2 gallons of good cherry flavored beer. If you use them in 5 whole gallons of beer, the result will be pretty weak, just sort of pink and tart but not much else. You need to use a ton of cherries to get much flavor out of them.
No need to cook them. Freeze them, pits and all. Don’t remove the pits as they add a lot of flavor. They do contain cyanide, but I’ve never heard of it killing anyone from putting them into a cherry flavored beer. The act of freezing the cherries helps pop open all the cell walls and release the flavors better. Then thaw them out, and rack your beer onto them in secondary, and allow to ferment a few more weeks. They’ll add some serious tartness, as well as color, in addition to the flavor and aroma obviously. Good base beers… well, pretty much anything without a lot of hops.
ok,
I’ve had this American Wheat Recipe “in my file” for a while, and thought I may just do a 5 gallon batch of this,
at completion of Fermentation rack half to a secondary with the cherries, and the other half to the bottling bucket.
Feedback on the recipe would be appreciated, thanks!
5.5 lbs wheat Malt
5.5 2-row
1 caramel/crystal
1 oz williamette 60min
1 oz sterling 15min
1 oz sterling EOB
Question on the cherries as I have read this thread closely and am going to make a Berliner Weisse soured with White Labs WLP630 yeast and racking on the cherries in secondary. Taking fresh whole cherries is cleaning them simply by rinsing with water adequate?? Or is there another way to rid the pesticides???
I recommend soaking the whole cherries in cool water for an hour and then rinsing them. Then I recommend freezing them to help control any wild bacteria plus it helps to break down the cherry pulp for secondary ferment.
I’ve got about 18 lbs of tart cherries in the freezer. I rinsed them in star-san prior to freezing. Anyone else do this, or am I just wasting star-san?