Brewing Fruited Beers
We’ve been fond of saying over the years that if there’s one weird development of modern humanity it’s been the increased procrustean standards that we place our foods and beverages against. “Is it authentic?” “Is it real beer?” When you dig into humanity’s alcoholic history, it’s terrifically clear that our forerunners didn’t hew to “this is a grain-based beverage,” “this is a sugar beverage,” etc. Time and time again you see confounding mixtures of grains, sugars, and fruits — if it could ferment, then humans used it.
And maybe some of that modern “guidelines” habit is passing into the mores of yesteryear as we see craft brewers throwing everything they can think of at their brew kettle, fermenters, and kegs in an attempt to entice a patron to spend a little cash. Looking at you – double fruited, double dry hopped sour milkshake hazy IPA (an actual commercial beer that Drew tried).
Fruit has a long history in beer, even with the obsession with beverage purity, and it’s easy to see why. Fruit is fun and colorful, it tastes great, and it adds a different zip to the usual mixture of barley and hops. With relatively little work, fruit can dramatically alter your beer.
Why Am I Adding This?
Before you start thinking about how you’re going to use the gargantuan cornucopia of fruit available to the modern brewer, we’ll remind you of our continual plea: Ask yourself, “Why am I adding this to my beer? Does this make sense?”
As an example, if you’ve got a potently bitter IPA, throwing fruit into the mix just doesn’t make any sense. If the strongest fruits get lost in the noise, then there’s little point.
But let’s say you’re planning ahead and say, “Self, I’m really fond of strawberries and I need my IPAs. How can I combine these loves of mine?” Then you can structure your IPA in a way that makes sense to allow strawberries to carry forth (use less bitterness, bring in the strawberry-lime flavors from Belma® hops, and get a couple of different strawberry additives).
Conversely, a lesson that every brewer should commit to memory is the rescue powers of strong fruit flavors. Sometimes your beer doesn’t quite turn out the way you want it to (maybe it’s slightly phenolic or in the case of one of our porters, incredibly tannic) — a quick use of an appropriate fruit or fruit extract product can erase the flaw and make a stellar beer drinking experience!
What Beers to Fruit
Now the question comes, “What beer am I going to fruit?” Since fruit is an added expense to your brew day, brewers tend to look to styles that let it shine like a Klieg light searching the skies for enemy planes. If you look at the world’s fruit-filled beer styles, what do you see? A lot of pale wheat beers, spontaneously fermented ales, and kettle sours. Wheat gives a soft doughy taste that conjures up sunny summer days filled with pies and tarts. Wild sours deliver a diverse and complex canvas to match with fruits. And quick kettle sours mix the world of “ades” (e.g., lemonade) and slushies with an acid bite that pops the fruit character even harder.
Those are the easy answers, but what about something not all “pale and wheaty?” You know Drew and his love of Belgian styles has led him to add fruit to saisons and tripels galore (including the Dole Whip Tripel at the end of this article).
As you look at more intense styles and beer flavors, you need to think about more intense fruiting. Leave the subtler stone fruits behind and focus on strong berries and tropical fruits. It wouldn’t be out of bounds to create a chocolate cherry stout — actually, that sounds really delicious right now — but maybe more of a fall/winter project! Even an intensely malt-forward barleywine could be enhanced with the addition of dark dried fruits like figs, prunes, and raisins, and Belgian Quad screams for something to play with the naturally occurring plum flavors.
And while you might be tempted to just think malt vs. hops, note how many of these examples depend on an aspect of fermentation — sours as bright fruit punchers, spicy Belgian strains enhancing warm fruit flavors, and plummy/estery yeasts pushing those dark fruits.
What Fruits to Beer
Hopefully by this point you know what fruit you want to add. You probably chose it first and we can’t think of one that hasn’t been used in beer to “great” effect (looking at you Durian Lambic from the 2024 Southern California Homebrewers Fest). Berries are the longtime go-to for brewers — particularly big bold flavor powerhouses like raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries.
Some fruits are more difficult to capture like the stone fruits. Peach character fades in a New York minute. Watermelon, after fermentation, tastes nothing like watermelon — often coming across as more of the rind character.
The harder it is to keep the flavor around, the more fruit you’ll need! We once had a strawberry lager project that required pounds and pounds of fresh fruit, that was then augmented with more frozen fruit and even some concentrate and it still tasted like the faint memory of your grandma’s strawberry candies from a block away (read on for the final fix to that fiasco).
Oh, and while we’re talking about impacts – what about the alcohol impact? Fruit is sugar and sugar is booze, right? At least in the case of your less processed/unconcentrated fruits – there’s also a fair amount of water in fruit. Things like orange juice usually come in around 1.048 gravity. If you add a gallon of OJ to a beer that is less than 1.048, you’ve boosted your overall level of sugar. If you add it to a 1.070 IPA, you’ve actually increased your volume, but reduced the overall alcohol concentration! Always check the gravity of the juice to see how it will impact the beer instead of just assuming that an addition of fruit will boost alcohol after fermentation is complete.
Fruit Factor
You’ve chosen your beer, you’ve chosen your fruit, now you’ve got to decide how to squish all that fruity goodness into your glass. The first question in front of you is, “What form of fruit do I go with?” You’ve got options:
Fresh: The obvious choice — pick (or buy) fresh fruit! That’s what our ancestors always did. A few things to consider: If you’re buying fresh fruit, only buy stuff that’s actually in season and hasn’t been shipped halfway around the world in a container and gassed to appear bright. These fruits are often devoid of flavor to eat, and much worse when used to brew with. The best trick up Drew’s sleeve is to roam his local farmer’s markets right around closing time. Look for the fruit that’s too ripe to hold onto and grab a deal because produce going back to the farm is money not made with extra labor costs. Seriously, one time Drew made a blood orange saison with in-season, beautifully ripe organic Moros for 75% off because they didn’t want to load another 50 lbs. (23 kg) of oranges into the truck!
Once you get your bounty home, give it a quick wash, cut it up (the more surface area, the faster the flavor absorption), bag it into freezer bags, and freeze the fruit. The average household freezer works relatively slowly, creating large jagged ice crystals that work for our “give me all your flavor and sugar” needs. What about sanitation, you ask. Even Drew, who’s normally as paranoid as a tin foil hat, doesn’t sanitize his fruit. He trusts the combination of washing, freezing, and a hostile fermentation environment keeping stray microbes at bay. Depending on the intensity of the fruit you’ve selected, we recommend 1–3 lbs. of fresh fruit per gallon of beer (120–350 g/L).
Frozen: What if you want to brew a beer with a fruit that isn’t in season and you can’t get it fresh? The easy answer is to skip all that washing and prep work required before you freeze fresh fruit and just buy frozen fruit. It’s convenient, if not slightly more expensive, and has the advantage of being better quality produce than most of what you could buy at the average supermarket, even in season. Just like when brewing with fresh fruit, there is no real need to worry about sanitation — just thaw and dump the previously frozen fruit into the mix.
Juice: It’s easy to find a thousand and one juices at the store, but in general we don’t advocate using juice as your main source of fruit flavor because so many of them are either really cheap and watery (and mostly apple juice) or incredibly expensive and still fairly dilutive of your beer. If you do use a juice, make sure it’s 100% your fruit choices and that it doesn’t have potassium sorbate as a stabilizer (more on that in a bit).
Purees: All the convenience of a juice, but made entirely of the fruit we’re after. If you look at what commercial breweries are doing for their beers, puree is what they use most of the time. Reputable companies like Oregon Fruit Co. produce aseptic fruit purees that are easy to grab and add to any beer on a whim. Just sanitize the package, open the can or pouch, and pour. You do pay more for these products, but they’re high-quality and ready to go. In this case, we feel that both quality and convenience make the expense worth it. One or two cans/pouches (~3 lbs./1.4 kg) delivers the punch of many pounds of fruit. (Note to pay attention to — cans are usually pressure-cooked, so the fruit is “cooked” for a longer period than the aseptic packaging in pouches.)
Dried: Fruit has been dried for millennia to preserve it and have it at the ready. With their concentrated sugars, these can work well. But make sure you grab “natural” or “unsulfured” fruit to avoid adding sulfur dioxide to your beer. (The right stuff is invariably darker and less inviting to look at, but we’re not looking at it! This may just be a Drew aversion because adding sulfur – even when it should dissipate – is unappealing, so he sticks to the rule of least processing possible.) Just chop it up and let it go. Drew likes the impact of dried apricots over their fresh counterparts. Just a quick chop of 4–8 oz. (~110–225 g) and toss them into the beer.
And to be space agey, you can also buy “freeze-dried” fruits like strawberries and blueberries. The light-weight fruit can be crushed into a fine powder in the bag before adding to the fermenter. Drew keeps Trader Joe’s freeze-dried fruit pouches on hand – just one or two of the ridiculous light-weight bags (~1.2 ounces/34 g per bag) adds an exhilarating amount of flavor.
Concentrates and Extracts: The last two options to talk about are far more processed. We’re not really fans of the concentrates we’ve tried because — to Drew’s taste — they tend to come off as cooked jam slurry thinned with a bit of water. Extracts, on the other hand, can be used to great effect, particularly in conjunction with actual fruit. On their own, they often read “chemically,” but a hard-to-capture fruit like strawberry can be juiced up with a small addition of extract, which is how we solved the aforementioned strawberry beer in which fruit itself didn’t offer enough flavor.
When to Add Fruit
The last thing to consider with your fruit is when to add it?
The general rule is the later you add a fruit in fermentation, the more aroma and flavor will remain. But keep in mind the later you add it, the longer it may take to bring the batch to a stable gravity due to reduced yeast activity. Another reason to consider later additions is that fermented fruit doesn’t always taste great — see how many fermented orange juice projects taste like something has gone “global pandemic crisis movie” levels of wrong.
We both prefer our fermentations to come to a complete stop, both from a stability point of view and a balance perspective, but that’s not the case with a wide swath of fruit beers today that try to arrest fermentation to create a full-on fruit slushy bomb. And a bomb they can be — remember that any yeast in the beer, no matter how tired or overwhelmed — will look at all that free sugar like a glutton looks at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
To create the slushy effect, allow the beer to ferment out completely and crash it clear. Rack the beer into a purged keg along with a dose of potassium sorbate (aka Sorbistat-K). Add the fruit puree to the keg, seal it, carbonate, and mix vigorously. Since we can’t easily pasteurize, we need to depend on the mix of sorbate’s prevention of a new fermentation with the stabilizing impact of chilling. We don’t recommend bottling or canning the beer because we’re paranoid about bursting fruit-powered hand grenades!
To enhance the slushy experience, you can add a dose of lactose (1 lb. per 5 gallons/0.45 kg per 19 L) to the boil kettle to lend an extra mouthfeel, but overdoing it can make for a beer that drinks like a protein shake.
If the resulting fruit beer (slushy or non-slushy) feels a bit “flabby” or flat on the palate, take a trick out of the vintner’s playbook and add a small touch of citric, malic, and/or lactic acid. The human palate reads acid as a key component of fresh and bright. If you choose good fruit (or a well-manufactured fruit product), you probably won’t need to do this, but keep it in your brewing toolkit.
Fruit is fun, fresh, and absolutely delivers a flavored punch that can attract non-beer drinkers to the party or scintillate jaded taste buds tired of the same old same old. Plus, didn’t your doctor tell you need to consume more fruit?
Dole Whip Tripel
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.082 FG = 1.013
IBU = 27 SRM = 4 ABV = 9.1%
Ingredients
13 lbs. (5.9 kg) Weyermann Pilsner malt
2 lbs. (0.9 kg) fonio (or substitute wheat malt)
1 lb. (0.45 kg) lactose (0 min.)
3 lbs. (1.4 kg) Fierce Fruit pineapple puree (added after 7 days of fermentation)
7 AAU Magnum hops (60 min.) (0.6 oz./17 g at 12% alpha acids)
3.4 fl. oz. (100 mL) vanilla extract
Wyeast 3787 (Trappist High Gravity), White Labs WLP530 (Abbey Ale), Imperial Yeast B48 (Triple Double), or LalBrew Abbaye yeast
¾ cup corn sugar (if priming)
Step by step
I used the Bru’n Water “Yellow Dry” water profile for this beer and used a step mash. Begin by mashing grains at 122 °F for 12 minutes and then raise to 131 °F for 15 minutes. Raise to 142 °F for 30 minutes, and then raise to 154 °F for 30 minutes. Mash out and vorlauf until runnings are clear. Collect 6 gallons (23 L) of wort and boil for 60 minutes, adding hops at the start of the boil. At the end of the boil add the lactose and chill to fermentation temperature, 63 °F (17 °C). Ferment at this temperature for three days, and then raise the temperature to 67 °F (19 °C). After four days at this temperature, add the pineapple puree and allow to ferment out for about a week.
Add the vanilla extract to a keg and transfer the beer to the keg and force carbonate, or add the extract to the bottling bucket and bottle as usual.
Extract option:
Replace the Pilsner and fonio malts with 9 lbs. (4.1 kg) Pilsner liquid malt extract and 1 lb. (0.45 kg) wheat dry malt extract. Heat 6 gallons water to a boil and then turn off heat as you stir in both malt extracts. Return to heat and boil for 60 minutes. Follow the remainder of the all-grain recipe.
