Homebrew Beer Blog

Recently I discovered New Glarus Belgian Red and it's good stuff. Also, I recently judged fruit beers and all that got my wheels turning. I never use real fruit before, just the flavor extracts. I made up a double batch wheat beer, and split it with WLP320 and WLP550. The other part of this is I've got a sack of German Wheat I'm working through, so I wanted it make a light wheat beer.

I went looking for some fruit, and I was going to go with the Oregon Puree stuff, but wanted to use tart cherries. They only sell sweet cherries. New Glarus uses Wisconsin Montmorency cherries, and I found some canned Michigan Montmorency cherries. They're canned in water, pitted and stemmed. So, they're pretty convenient and closest I'll probably care to get to fresh whole fruit. I ordered a case (about 12 lbs) and put 6# in each batch. Without the pits and stems, I figure it should be close to 7.5 lbs of whole fruit.

Anyway, the canned fruit is cool since it's already sterile. I fermented each batch individually, then racked to a secondary w/ the fruit. Basically my recipe is 50/50 Maris Otter and Wheat, with 1 LB C40 and 12 IBUs. We'll see how it turns out.