I’m looking to make a Blueberry wheat, I do plan on kegging and bottling some. I was thinking about using fruit puree for priming the bottles. Has anyone used fruit puree as priming sugar in bottles? Anyone know if i’m going to make more work for myself then i need to?
Thanks,
Michael
Seems like you’d end up with way too much “gunk” in your bottles. Normally, you secondary on the fruit and then rack off of it to the bottling bucket.
Also it would be really hard to gauge how much to use. Sugar content of fruit is variable.
Yep, those are the two best reasons I can think of not to do it. The gunk in the bottle is the biggest problem, you could probably measure the sugar in a sample and then estimate for the rest well enough. But that macerated blueberry in the bottle, that’s just going to be a mess.
Thanks guys, I was thinking the gunk would be a major turn off. Is there anyway to calculate out how much alcohol is being added from say a pound of puree to a 5 gallon batch of brew?
You’ve got to measure the sugar content of the puree.
how would one find out the level of sugar in the puree?
This was my original plan. I was going to brew a Wheat ale and when primary fermentation was complete I was going to get anywhere from 6-12 12oz beer bottles and add varying amounts of fruit puree to gauge the level of fruit flavoring i’d get. I was also going to cap some of them to get an understanding of the amount of carbonation i might get.
From some of the earlier discussions I’ve decided not to worry about carbonating with puree so that step will be taken out.
When i dial in the right amount of flavoring i want i was going to scale up the amount of fruit puree to a 5 gallon batch. then brew the same wheat ale again and after primary fermentation is complete rack to a secondary and add fruit puree. I figured i’d just arbitraly add 1% to the alcohol content of the Wheat beer from fermentation of the fruit puree. figuring out a more exact number would be wonderful.
to figure out the sugar content of the puree the easiest way to get in the ballpark is to do a mixture of the puree with water and then take a SG reading, then calculate based on how much you diluted it.
With blueberries, I would just start with a pound per gallon and see what you think. You might even go to 2 lbs per gallon or more before you get the flavor you want, it depends on what you like.
Do you have a hydrometer? if so you can scale down 1 lb per gallon to a sample size (1 oz fruit to 8 oz water) and mix it up really well then take a hydrometer reading. it won’t be completely accurate because the pulp will affect the reading though. if you have a refractometer that is ideal. it’s kind of what they are meant for. then I think you just crush a blueberry and and put a little juice on the refractometer and robert is your mothers brother!
what he said
Do you have a hydrometer? - sure do, never brew without one.
Ok, I’ll give this a try and see how things work out. Thanks a lot.