WindRiver Brewing Internet Newsletter
|
WindRiver Internet Newsletter: July 1998 This month's theme is fruit beer and how to make them, and also includes a sale on your choice of raspberry, cranberry, blueberry or cherry weizen! These are excellent beers to make during the summer, and make a great addition to a summer picnic or barbecue or other festive setting. If you do not want to receive this newsletter anymore just email us back and asked to be removed from the list. Good Brewing! A Fruit Beer Retrospective For anyone who has paid attention to the beer scene during the last few years, fruit beers have become almost a cottage industry unto themselves. But don't think that this is a new invention. Like many fads, the fruit beer craze is actually just a reinvention of something that began centuries ago. As with many eccentric brewing procedures, the Belgians were the first to add fruit to their brews. The earliest fruit beers were made with "lambic" as a base. Lambic is one of the oldest beers produced in Europe. If you look at the paintings of Bruegel, you can find depictions of beer being drunk from earthenware crocks that date back to the 15th and 16th century. This indicates that lambic had become very popular among the peasantry by then, and was probably first made at least several hundred years before this. A lambic, in the most simplest sense, is just a wheat beer. What differentiates a lambic from a wheat beer is twofold. First, the term lambic as actually an appellation similar to champagne. Lambic is a corruption of the word "Lembeek" which refers to a town just outside of Brussels in Belgium. The wheat beers produced by breweries in an area close to the original town of Lembeek eventually gained the name lambic, and was restricted only to those producers who originated in this area (the story of the origin of the term "lambic" is rather complex and convoluted. For more details see Michael Jackson, The Great Beers of Belgium). Second, lambic has a very distinctive flavor. A lambic is made with yeast and bacteria naturally present in the air and also inside of the lambic breweries. The flora which produce lambic are a combination between an ale yeast (uvarum cervesiae), a wild yeast (bruxellensis or lambicus) and a lactic acid producing bacteria (usually a Delbruckii strain). This spontaneous fermentation produces a beer with very sour flavor and horsey or leathery aroma. Sometimes these beers are sweetened with sugar (Faro), served plain (Gueze) or are refermented with additional fruit. A cherry lambic (Kriek), raspberry (framboise), peach (peche), are the most popular varieties, but one can, more rarely, find examples made with grape, pineapple, banana and pear. The most traditional lambics tend to be dry and tart, but other examples are now available that use fruit syrups instead of real fruit, giving these beers a much sweeter more dessert-like quality. In the tradition of using fruit to balance sourness are the style known as Berliner Weisse. Unlike the traditional weizenbier, which has a rich malty body and a clove-banana spice flavor, Berliner Weisse has an extreme sour flavor and a very dry and light body. In order to make these beers more palatable, it became traditional to serve them with fruit syrups. This gives their weissbier a sweet and sour characteristic. Finally, there is the more recent trend, to create more wine-coolerish beers by adding fruit syrup to light beers. This gives many of the recent microbrewed fruit beers an overwhelming sweet flavor, which tends to overwhelm the other flavors of the beer. It is also common to find some darker beers such as porters and stouts made with fruit. These examples tend to meld with these very flavorful recipes, creating a much more balanced final product. Fruit Wheat: A Recipe Wheat beers make a great recipe to use for your fruit beer because they are already fairly light in color and flavor, so any fruit you add to the mix will have the most impact. The sweetness of fruit also acts as a nice balance to the somewhat tart flavor a wheat beer can exhibit. Also, the fact that wheat beers can be fermented at warmer than average temps, and the fact that fresh fruit becomes much more readily available during the summer, make them a perfect combination. The choice of fruit is very important. Although you can use just about fruit, try to pick one that has a fairly aggressive flavor and is very aromatic. This reasoning makes raspberry one of the most popular choices. A wheat beer made with raspberry has an aroma that you can just about smell from across the room. Cherry also works well, but tends to come across more strongly in the flavor than the aroma. Blueberry has more subtle flavor than either of these two and its presence is indicated mainly in the aroma. Cranberry can also be used, and is perceived mainly as a tart flavor, perhaps better served in a recipe with more sweetness than that of a wheat beer. What is the attraction of fruit wheat beer? During the summer, these beers (as long as they are not too sweet) offer a refreshing alternative to light beers. They are wonderful when served very cold on a hot day, especially if you have any chores. Fruit beers also pack so much flavor that they can be well made, even if your fermentation temperatures are on the high side. If this has piqued your interest, take advantage of this offer: ALL FRUIT WHEAT BEERS ON SALE (USUALLY $24.95 W/DRY YEAST) NOW $21.21 (THAT'S 15% OFF!) PLEASE SPECIFY YOUR CHOICE OF RASPBERRY, CHERRY, BLUEBERRY OR CRANBERRY BEFORE ADDING TO YOUR SHOPPING BASKET
SALE GOOD UNTIL AUGUST NEWSLETTER COMES OUT ASK DR. ZOOT Q. How and when should fruit be added to a beer? A. There are two ways to add fruit to a beer. The safest is to add it to the wort as it is cooling off. Add fresh or frozen fruit to wort that is at 160 - 170 and allow it to steep at that temperature for 10 - 20 minutes to pasteurize the fruit. It is usually a good idea to also about 1 teaspoon per gallon of beer you will be making of pectic enzyme to prevent the fruit from forming an unclearable haze. If you are using freshly picked fruit, it is sometimes beneficial to freeze it before adding to your beer, as the freezing process bursts cell walls, making the juice more available to the beer. After the fruit has stepped for 10 - 20 minutes in your hot wort, allow it to cool to pitching temperature by immersing your brew pot in a sink full of ice cold or very cold water for 20 - 25 minutes, or use a wort chiller. Then strain the fruit out and pour into your fermenter along with any water you need to top your fermenter off to the 5 gallon mark. Proceed as normal from here on. Another method, which does not require pasteurization of the fruit is to add it to your secondary fermenter when you transfer the beer. One technique I have used in the past is to use a large open top plastic bucket (like the one we use for a primary fermenter) and take the large sparge bag we sell and place it inside of the bucket. Then add your fruit to the fermenter, and transfer your beer into the bag-in-a-bucket and attach the lid to the fermenter (with airlock) the best you can. Don't worry if it is not air tight, as long as it shields your beer from fruit flies and any debris that may fall inside. Allow the beer to ferment for 1 - 2 weeks until the activity subsides, then either transfer to another fermenter or directly to your bottling bucket. This way, the fruit stays behind inside of the nylon mesh bag, making it easy to dispose of once you are done. Which method to use? Fruit added using the first method will have a lot of fruit flavor but not a lot of aroma. If you use method 2 you will get a huge aroma, and pretty good flavor. I have heard of some people using 1/2 of their fruit using Method 1, and the other half for method 2, making for a wonderfully flavorful fruit beer. Q. What if I am using fruit extracts? A. When using fruit extracts, I have found that the later you add the extract in the brewing process, the more flavor and aroma carries over to the finished beer. When using fruit essences like the ones we sell, we have found that you get the most bang for your buck by adding it at bottling time. However, if you are looking for a beer with very subtle fruit highlights, add the fruit essence when you pitch the yeast. For medium flavor and aroma, add the essence when you transfer to secondary, and for maximum add the essence at bottling time. Don't worry about pasteurizing any fruit essences, they're usually pre-sterilized and ready to go. Q. How long should I age a fruit beer? A. You will find that fruit beers are usually at peak flavor 1 - 2 months after they are bottled. If they age longer than this, they seem to lose some of that distinctive fruit character, as the flavors of the beer begin to meld together. Q. What type of yeast is best for fruit beer? A. Again, it depends what you are looking for. Neutral yeasts will definitely highlight the fruit aspect of your beer (American Ale 1056, British Ale 1098, or dry yeast), while more complex yeasts (Bavarian Weizen 3056, Weihenstephan Wheat 3068, German Wheat 3333, Belgian Abbey 1214) tend to mask the fruit flavor a bit. More neutral yeasts are also more likely to retain more of the sweet flavor of the fruit in your beer.
Cheers and Good Brewing!! |