Hi everyone,
Just bottled my first batch of a stout yesterday. I didn’t do a secondary fermentation and let it sit for 3 weeks. It smelled great. Very excited to try it.
anyway, I’ve got a bunch of dried fruit laying around the house- sour cherries, pears, apples, persimmons, plums and lots of rolled oats. Has anyone ever used dried fruit in brewing? If so, how? At what point would this be put in- with the grains in the bag or tossed in with the hops?
I was thinking of trying to do an oatmeal stout with cherries. Does anyone have recommendations for me, or a recipe? Thanks,
S. Squirrel
I would think to maintain fruit flavors/aromas you would want to add it directly to the fermenter. Perhaps even racking the already fermented beer directly onto the fruit in another container which would start a new ferment.
Did you dry the fruit yourself or is this something purchased? The reason I mention it is if you do not know how it was dried it could be treated with sulfites or other preservatives that might inhibit your yeast.
Otherwise I think it would work great. Not sure how to account for the sugar in it. I would imagine dried fruits are more concentrated.
Enso
the fruit i have was commercially dried. It does not have any preservatives. Dried fruit is usually composed of fructose and had a higher sugar level than regular fruit. I wonder how it will work…
Hi everyone,
I wanted to give an update to using the dried fruit question. I made a Belgian white partial extract. I omitted the coriander and orange peel from the recipe as i didn’t want competing flavors.
The beer went really crazy during fermentation; so much so that it continued to krausen its way out of the airlock. Being that this is my second batch of beer (I’m new at this) I somehow got the rubber cork stopper shoved into the fermenter after changing out the airlock. I thought, hell, I just contaminated the whole thing. I ended up using the drain in the primary to transfer to the glass carboy- and committing the “don’t aerate the beer while transferring” rule. At this point, I thought all might be lost, so I took my dried pear halves and tore them up and shoved them into the carboy. I put about 2-3 pounds worth it.
It continued to ferment. After 10 days or so I bottled the beer and let it sit. Turned out great; there is even a hint of pear. The stuff is really high in alcohol as well…
The only problem is trying to get them out once your done… I used chopped fresh peaches in the secondary once… getting them all out took about 2 hrs… now I puree.
I’ve added dried fruit in the secondary and in the boil:
I recently used raisins in a belgian porter recipe. I weighed out about 7 oz, pureed them with hot wort, and added the puree with about 7 min left to go. Its not quite done cellaring, but the raisins add a great, smooth, “raisiny” flavor and maybe even texture.
I used dried cherries in the secondary of an apple cider. Even with the cider on the cherries for a solid month, I couldn’t detect any flavors from them. This might have been hidden by the cinnamon sticks added as well.
As for the extract content, I used the nutritional facts on the back. They give “Sugars” in grams, and I assumed they were all fermentable. This was fairly accurate for the raisins, but it will probably work for other dried fruit
I have used raisins, dates, prunes, and dried cherries all in a Quad. However, I caramelized them first in a searing skillet. I, then deglazed with the beer that they were going into. It added nice flavor.
However, in a stout, I would use fresh fruit or high quality concentrate. I used to make a killer tart cherry stout that one a blue ribbon in the NHC. I would add 10 lbs of tart montmorency cherries in the secondary. If you’ve had Bell’s Cherry Stout, it’s along that line. I’ve also used this in a cherry wheat and would probably use it in the cherry stout if I were to make it again. This concentrate is much more convenient, and because it’s high quality, I didn’t see or taste any ill effects. http://www.shorelinefruit.com/cart/6/cherry-concentrate/-cherry-bay-orchards-tart-montmorency-cherry-concentrate—32-oz
I was just going to reiterate caution when adding some commercially dried fruit, as they may have an oil on them for packaging purposes that could affect your head retention. Just something to keep in mind.
I have made some cyser with dried cranberries. The difficulty I ended up having was adding the dried cranberries after fermentation had finished; they contain so much additional sugar that the cyser got too sweet. If I were to do it again, I’d add them close to terminal gravity but while the yeast were still active enough to ferment out some of the extra sugar. I’d have to look back in my log book to see if I recorded how much dried fruit I added- I know it was a lot!
If I had to pick, I think I’d prefer tart cherry juice or concentrate over dried cherries. I get that toffee-like, raisiny flavor from dried berries and cherries (although nowhere near as strong as in an actual raisin), and I don’t know if I’d want that in a cider.
Agreed. I really like the tart Montmorency concentrate from this company over any puree I’ve used, in both beer and cider. It has excellent flavor and acidity.
I have used frozen tart cherries in cider, which works very well.
Plus, dried cherries in a Supplication clone (not yet finished). If you want to use dried cherries, make sure that there is no addition of (sunflower) oil. This is almost always the case.