Pairing Hops and Fruit: Tips from the Pros

You should always take into account the intensity of fruit aroma and flavor when deciding how to hop your beer.

Brewer: Adam Bailey,  Bonfire Brewing in Eagle, CO

Whether you call them fruit IPAs or hoppy fruit beers, one thing we can all agree to call them is delicious when done well. But, pairing two ingredients with such prominent flavors and aromas can also turn into a muddled mess if not done carefully. Get tips from three pros who don’t shy away from the challenge.

We’ve done a handful of hoppy beers with fruit in the past including a blueberry pale ale, passion fruit and lime zest Citra® ale, a foraged rose hip hoppy Amarillo® wheat beer, and a peach and blackberry pale ale. Our most recent example is called Pink-I Raspberry IPA, which uses Falconer’s Flight® during the mid-late boil and Citra® hops exclusively in the late boil and dry hop additions. The Falconer’s Flight® hop blend has a medley of flavors from citrus and pine to more subtle earth and herbal characteristics that sets the base tone of the beer’s hop profile while Citra® then takes the center stage with tropical and citrus flavors reminiscent of papaya, mango, and grapefruit. We chose these varieties mainly for their compatibility with the raspberry fruit flavor, which also contributes a bit of tartness and a perceived light sweetness.

You should always take into account the intensity of fruit aroma and flavor when deciding how to hop your beer. This may take some trial and error while working with new fruit and hop varieties but the key is to always trust your palate. Having used raspberry in the past and knowing its intensity, we knew that a larger hopping rate would be necessary for us to bring out the IPA of the base style in Pink-I to keep it from simply being perceived as a raspberry ale. For almost any IPA that we do, we prefer to have a whirlpool addition and dry hop. If you’re feeling ambitious you could always cool the wort down to approximately 180 °F (82 °C) for a hop stand addition in effort to preserve as much of the aroma and minimize the isomerization of the alpha acids for less bitterness.

For Pink-I we use roughly 0.5 lb./gallon (0.06 kg/L) of raspberry puree. We add the fruit directly to the fermenter as we near our target final gravity and the fermentation is still active. This allows the yeast to ferment the added fructose and glucose sugars from the raspberry. Depending on the fruit we will vary the amount added per batch. Some fruits have more or less flavor and tartness than others and we account for those varying levels to hit our target flavor profile. For hopping, Citra® tends to have a more potent aroma than other varieties we use, so we do around 0.25–0.5 oz./gallon (1.9–3.7 g/L) for late addition hops and closer to 0.5–1 oz./gallon (3.7–7.5 g/L) dry hop.

Consider the native microflora if you are using fresh fruit. For the Pink-I, we are trying to make a clean beer with big raspberry fruit flavor, so we use an aseptic raspberry puree. In addition you should keep in mind that if you add the fruit during fermentation it will consume the sugars and could taste much more tart.

Fruit can be added to any IPA substyle. The brewer needs to consider what the base IPA flavor profile has to offer and which fruit may pair well with that, or even present a counter flavor to it. A bright West Coast-style IPA with juiced, pureed, or zested citrus? Maybe a softer plum English IPA? This is where the fun of the craft is.