Cherry experiment

General Homebrew Discussion
1

Hey BA’ers!  I’m doing an experimental procedure, and I thought I’d seek some critique.
A friend of mine has some great tasting cherries, I put about 2.5# in a Belgian wheat beer.  The smell coming from it is very appetizing.  Anyway, he brought me many more cherries today and I want to make a Cherry “pseudo wine”.  I say Pseudo wine because I want to use some Belgian Ale yeast I have.  So here’s what I’m going to do:

  1. Mash cherries up with some blunt kitchen instrument (potato masher?)
  2. Drain cherries utilizing sanitized strainer and/or nylon mesh bag.
  3. Heat juice to “almost” boiling, so as to sanitize (I’m really not concerned if I get some beasties, I would appreciate a little sourness).
    4)  Cool down in a cold water bath.
    5)  Add to a 3 gallon carboy, add yeast.
  4. ferment for about 3-4 weeks, and bottle (aging time will depend on my O.G.).

Any thoughts?

2

I wouldn’t do the boil, ferment the whole pulp, strain at the end of primary.

3

Very good.  Will the lack of a boil give me too much microflora?

4

You said you wouldn’t mind sour.  :stuck_out_tongue:
You can hit it with K-metabisulfite.1/4tsp powder per 5 gallons.
If you’re really scared, freezing could also be used to kill off the unwanted bacteria without changing the cherry juice.

Are you adding water/sugar to hit a specific gravity, or are you hoping to just ferment 100% juice?
Can you take a reading to see the sugar content of your juice before you start?

5

I’ll throw out a dumb question:

If the skins of the cherries are intact, why not just soak the cherries in StarSan solution (1 oz in 5 gallons distilled H2O) for two minutes and strain out the cherries with a collander.  It should kill the bugs.

I just don’t know if the phosporic acids can penetrate the skins.  If nobody has ever tried it, you could do a quick experiment with a handful of cherries first.

6

While freezing decreases the rate of reactions and sometimes kills off some unwanted living organisms, it does not completely kill off all living organisms.

7

I’ll second that.  Made a blackberry blonde for the lady.  Froze the berries and added to secondary and racked beer on top.  Beer going into the secondary tasted great.  Beer that is now bottled has a definite sourness from wild fermentation.  Those wild yeast went to town on my beer.  Oddly enough I like it.  Has a definite wild fermentation character that I enjoy.  Moral of the story is that freezing will not kill off all bacteria.  Perhaps make it dormant, but not dead.

8

More importantly…  what does the lady think?

9

I think I’m just going to go with “just juice”.  I will take a gravity reading first, and if it’s sub-1.050 I’ll add more sugar.

10

It’s not her cup of tea, but good thing I made only one case of it.