Fruit

Introduction

Adding fruit to beer can enhance a beer ot completely change its taste. While a balanced fruit beer should not change the basic taste of the original beer – after all if you wanted a powerful and overwhelming fruit taste you might as well brew a cider. Even when done properly, the beer can vary widely in taste and potency.

Beer-Friendly Fruit

There are no fast rules about adding fruit to beer. Fruit flavors can be added fresh, frozen, cooked, smoked, pureed, juiced, zested, and even added as an extract. Also adding fruits in different stages of the brewing process can greatly affect the flavor.

Methods

• Fresh Fruit - While fresh fruit sounds good in theory, fresh fruit is VERY dirty and can carry unwanted microbes into your brew. Fruit should be washed thoroughly and then sanitized by boiling, microwaving, or freezing.
• Add to Mash - Some rare recipes will call for adding fruit to the top of the MLT when sparaging. The drawback is that the acids from the fruit could pull unwanted flavors out of your grains.
• Boil - Only a few fruits are good for boiling. Most fruit should never be boiled and should not be added to primary fermentation. Boiling fruit can destroy it's enzemes and can cause it to release pectin. Citris and citris rinds can sometimes be boiled while berries should never be boiled. Berries particularly can cause beer to get a pickle flavor, which can taste like rotten fruit or bitter olives.
• Microwave - While this method will destroy a good number of microbes, the brewer runs the risk of releasing pectin from the fruit and destroying enziemes that give the fruit flavor and aroma.
• Freeze The most popular way to add fruit for a homebrew is to freezethe fruit and add it to secondary fermentation. Freezing does two things, it puts the microbes to sleep, making it hard for them to wake up and compete with the yeast for food. Second, it can burts the cell walls of the fruit releasing more flavor from the skins. While there is a minute rate of infection for this method, it keeps the fruits' natural enzymes and bacterium alive long enough to contribute significant flavor.
• Cook and Smoke - cooking can change the taste of your fruit in similar ways that boiling does. However a Brewer cooks fruit in an attempt to infuse the fruit with a baked or smokey flavoring.
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Fruit

Apple

This can be added to a beer at any stage in the brewing process. A lot of only recipes call for apple juice to be addded into the wort cools. However since the flavor is so mild adding to secondary furmentation will produce stronger outcome.

Apricot

This flavor is very subtle and almost non-existant. For tronger flavors

Banana

(wells Banana Bread Beer)