Summertime is a great time for experimenting with adding fruit to beer. I know what you are thinking, but fruit beers don’t have to be super-sweet, cloying, or thick with artificial flavors. Two weeks ago I brewed one of our EZY Blonde Ale kits and then added five and a quarter pounds of raspberries to the five gallons of beer. I let the kit ferment normally for one week then transferred it to a secondary and added the raspberries. After a week of sitting on the raspberries for a week, the beer was bottled and my preliminary report is that it tastes fantastic!

My process for adding fruit was to buy seven twelve ounce bags of frozen raspberries from the grocery store, let them thaw to room temperature, and then pureed them in the blender. I then boiled the fruit in order to sterilize all of it and kill any wild bacteria and yeast that might be on the raspberries. Some people dislike this method since it can set the natural pectin that is in fruit and cause the beer to be cloudy, but I don’t really care. After cooling the fruit it was added to the beer which had been racked into a secondary carboy. Carbonation started in about six minutes and seemed to be done within two days. We left it on the fruit for a week, however, in order to extract as much fruit flavor as we could and to allow the raspberry solids to fall to the bottom of the carboy.

When bottling we tasted the near final product and agreed that it was amazing. The beer is a dark pink color, much like ruby-red grapefruit juice. The taste is intensely raspberry, but very dry. There is virtually no residual sweetness since our final gravity ended up at 1.008. While there is a little bit of the blonde coming trhough, it is almost all raspberries. I can’t wait for the final product once it is carbonated. Plans are already in the works to brew ten more gallons of this delicious nectar so that my buddy and I will have enough to last through the summer!