Fruit Beer Plan – Splitting Batches

I was thinking of making up some “fruited” wheats in the next go around of the mash tun.

I love trying to maximize my return in the brewhouse for the amount of work I put in, also while learning something in the process of each style I brew.  To that end, I think I am going to brew up a large batch of wheat style beer and split it into several fermenters for fruit additions in secondary.  Something along the line of an American Wheat (50/50 barley/wheat) with a simple hopping schedule.  This time though I think I want to use traditional American ale yeast like WLP001 or US-05.  I’ve never brewed a wheat beer without the contributing flavors of wheat yeasts, so now is the time to learn what wheat tastes like on its own (see, that’s the learning part!).

With my current setup, I think I can mash in a batch and collect about 14 gallons of wort, boil it down to about 12.5 gallons, then split it into three 4 gallon batches.  I’ll ferment them all with the same yeast strain.  Once done I plan to secondary two of them with fruit (strawberry and blueberry) and the third I leave plain for comparison as a base beer.  I am anxious to try the fruit purees I had talked about in an earlier post.

I realized too that blending the finished beers from the bottle might be interesting too. Like a 50/50 strawberry/blueberry mix.

I’ve got to go plan the ingredient list, but hopefully I can fire these brews off soon.
I’ll post the recipe and hopefully some pics of the process.

Cheers!