I don’t use a secondary very often as I tend to ferment in primary for at least two weeks then I cold crash and rack to a keg. Mainly I just like not taking the time to clean a secondary and then rack the beer. I prefer to just let it ferment out in primary and the next move is to the serving vessel. However, a secondary does have a practical applications occasionally, one being the addition of fruit.
AAAAAnd you won’t see that here. The few times I’ve done fruit beer in the past I have added fruit to secondary, then racked the beer on top of the fruit. This time I wanted to experiment with something different and keep with my simple one fermentor process I outlined above. In the case of my Cherry Wheat brew, I chose pureed cherry from a can. This cherry source is pasteurized at canning, so the fruit is ready to go. All I needed to do was sanitize the can, and pour it in the fermentor. Of course, I used a sanitized funnel to help get the red cherry goodness into the glass carboy I was using.
Going along with my easy as possible steps, I left a bucket of sanitizer next to the fermentor with my small funnel in it after the last brew session. All I did was to pull the airlock and bung out of the carboy, add the puree and replace the airlock.
No worries right?
Well, I did add the fruit 5 days into the ferment as I had planned. Thinking that the majority of fermentation should have been passed I hoped that by adding fruit to the primary would prevent a vicious blow-off. Well that part of the experiment was a failure. I ended up coming home the next day to an airlock dislodged from the carboy and it was full of fermentation goo. Not a problem though because I still had a bucket of sanitizer and an airlock already in there ready to go. The fermentation had already gone through its blow off phase apparently, because the fresh airlock hasn’t gotten gummed up yet.
I’ll have to edit this post with a link to tasting notes after the beer is done (in another week) to decide if the fruiting in the primary is as good as doing it in secondary.
BREW ON!
G Calderon
I’m new to brewing but a friend used orange peal in a american larger. The result was fantastic. I don’t know the amount used, but I plan to experiment when my confidence is higher.
Layla
well….how did it turn out? inquiring minds wanna know lol
Mike
Hey Layla thanks for keeping me honest.
I think I would still fruit in primary again as it was the easiest way I have ever added fruit. However, I’d use a slightly larger carboy to try limit the blow-off.
The cherry taste was pretty good and the nose was OK. My only issue was that there seemed to be a higher level of tannin like astringency in the beer than I am used to in my other beers. I hadn’t tasted it in the my initial wort samples. I think it was from using two whole cans of puree. I think I pick up some tannins from the skins of all that cherry puree.
I think next time the appropriate thing would be to use whole fruits that I process myself, which would limit the exposure of so much skin. Or I’d use one can of cherry puree and maybe supplement the flavor with a few ounces of cherry extract to balance out the effect.
That much cherry puree also darkened the beer quite a bit. It had a very deep ruby color and the head was pink. I normally don’t get that much color when using whole fruit. Again I think this indicates transfer of compounds from the skins at a higher rate than you’d expect from whole fruit.