Adding Stuff to Beer, Pt. 1
Howdy Readers,
And Happy 50th Post everyone! Huzzah!
Some years ago, a bartender named Sam worked at MacLeod. He was notable for a few things - his quick wit, his skill as a bard and with virtually all of the oddball sports (Bocce Ball, Darts, Bowling), his relative inability to answer basic questions about beer, etc. - but of his many quirks, the one that really tickled me was his skill as a humorist.
While the New York Times and Oprah haven’t caught on yet, all of his works are worth familiarizing oneself with, and perhaps chief among them (at least for now - he’s writing a book a month, don’t you know) is his seminal tome on the joys and horrors of modern beer, The Poetry of Beer (of which I think we still have a copy or two for sale).
While there are plenty of poems praising and delighting in the malty pleasures of pints and goblets of ale, the sharper pieces center upon a particular target of ire: modern brewers adding things (really anything, even a modest amount of hops) to beer. And boy must god have a sense of humor, because this was written in a simpler time of Blueberry Goses and Pumpkin Ales, a far cry from the blasphemous Pastry Stouts and Orange Sherbet Hazy IPAs of today (did I mention he hates hops?).
So today, partially in honor of Sam and the beer hell that he finds himself in, and the joy I take in observing his muted, battered, acquiescent horror at the Cronenbergian freaks filling the glasses around him, we’ll be talking about the process of adding stuff to beer, and in particular, we’ll be starting with fruit, the least atrocious of Ninkasi’s deviations.
The Old Method and Fruit Wines
It’s perhaps instructive to start with the extreme case when discussing fruit beers, which is to say, completely grainless fruit wines, including, obviously, wine. To make these beverages, one partially or completely converts solid fruits into a liquid, which, having a massive (read: effectively infinite) surface area, is readily consumed by yeast.
If this latter bit sounds a lot like beer making, that’s because it is - while the production of the “wort,” or must in the case of wines, differs, the process of fermentation is, while at times somewhat divergent, largely the same - you feed yeast sugary liquid, and they produce CO2 and ethanol in exchange, along with a range of flavorful and aromatic compounds (for better or worse).
Which is to say that, while the exact composition of sugars in wort and must differ, fruit sugars aren’t terribly different from malt sugars as far as yeast are concerned (particularly the fermentable ones), so adding fruit to beer is pretty much as simple as adding fruit to beer. Point in fact, the Egyptians would add honey and dates to their fancier beers in order to boost ABV and, presumably, improve their flavor.
More recently, though, one need only look to the Belgians for a currently produced fruited beer with a long history. Kreiks, which are among my favorite beers (ditto Flanders Red and Oud Bruin - I really dig those Belgian sours, intense as they are), are made by racking partially fermented Lambic base (read: wheat-heavy, hop-light wort that’s fermented slowly by a whole zoo of microbes). This process of racking beer onto fruit is certainly one that’s practiced today, and it’s perhaps my main method of fruiting my sours, which is to say, simply dumping a bunch of thawed fruit (like raspberries) into my beer and waiting.
This produces a lovely beer, but it also means that you’re leaving all of the sugars in the fruit at the mercy of your yeast; if you’d like a sweeter fruit beer, or would like to use a very subtle fruit that fermentation would completely muddle and thin out, you’ll have to try something else, or at least suppress fermentation somehow.
As a last note on the use of whole fruit, I’ve seen a very odd technique which produced a shockingly “normal” fruited beer flavor, but which is so bizarre that it bears mention in a survey of methods such as this - a brewery that buys wort from us once requested that we conduct a mash consisting of grains, as per usual, as well as whole f’ing strawberries tucked into the mash like pigs in a massive blanket. And it...worked!
The Fermentation Dials
As mentioned, if you’d like to ferment your fruit sugars completely out, you can add your fruit (in whatever form) at more or less any point between adding yeast and cold-crashing (which is where you rapidly chill the fermenter to aid in gravity-driven clarification, a process which drives most non-lager yeast dormant; filtration, the next step, then removes all yeast). The general wisdom is to do this at some point near the end of fermentation so that the CO2, which is being produced more or less uniform and isotropic (at least, locally - the CO2 floats upwards after all), doesn’t “scrub away” flavor, by dragging aromatic compounds out of the beer with it.
However, if you’d like to preserve some fruit sugars, you have a few options. First, and most obvious, is to do as the Germans do and just make a fruit syrup, adding that to the beer (in this case, tart and crisp Berliner Weisse). The next-most-obvious choice is to add the fruit, or fruit flavor, to the beer once you’ve filtered it, so there aren’t any yeast to chomp away at those sugars.
Finally, you can knock the yeast out in some way. This is done most often in the making of dessert wines (though it can be used generally where a target Brix, or sugar percentage, is desired), where something like ethanol (see: fortified wines) or even Sulfur Dioxide in order to deactivate the bulk of the yeast. This is, to my knowledge, fairly rare in brewing, particularly given the use of mechanical filtration (which accomplishes the same goal), but it’s an interesting option for a beer where partial fermentation is desired.
Modern Fruit Beers
While there are certainly a number of breweries that use the older methods in order to make fruited beers, and in particular sours (given the risk of infection that untreated fruit additions bring), it seems like the brewing world is shifting heavily towards the use of far easier to use and far more consistent fruit purees.
These are exactly what they sound like - purees of various fruits, which are then heat-treated in order to sterilize them, making them a super safe, yet still quite flavorful, source of real fruit flavor for beers. These are added at the usual times, somewhere in the tail end of fermentation in most cases, and produce beers that are quite close to their whole fruit siblings (though, arguably, not quite as good). We use this method of fruiting, for ease but also for their super low infection risk, and there is no better “real fruit” product, besides fresh, whole fruit, that I’m aware of.
However, any beer drinker familiar with Blue Moon has brushed up against the alternative: artificial flavorings (hey, it’s right on the can! It ain’t no secret!). They say if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all, so I’ll say that these are cheap and convenient, and for certain fruits, like citrus, I’d personally consider tossing some in a bottle of plain Gose as an experiment, and they may prove useful for super-low-stakes test batches, particularly for experimenting with a wide array of fruits, or combinations thereof, which would prove difficult and wasteful if using actual fruit.
Conclusion
While there are a number of products and methods for adding fruit to beer, the “band” of options and timings is quite narrow, and that’s largely due to the fact that the goal in fruit beers is usually pretty simple: give yeast access to the sugars in fruit, just not too soon, in large part because full-sugar fruited beers would likely, largely, be unbalanced.
And there’s great news if you’d like to try one such Chimera, assuming you missed the Tiki Sour, you can grab cans of a Strawberry/Banana variant of Murietta Milkshake, or a frosty Lemon/Lime Van ICE literally tomorrow.
Cheers,
Adrian “One Sour Cherry” Febre