Brewing a Fruited American Wheat Beer

thebeerjunkies...
Hello everyone! And welcome to our first brew session on our new system. We are starting out with our fruited American wheat beer. We use the same base that we made in our American wheat beer video, which is linked below.
American Wheat Beer - • Part 2: How To Brew an...
We walk you through the water profile, mashing, mashing out, sparging, boiling, knockout, fermentation, adding the purée, and the most important part, the taste test.
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thebeerjunkies...

[@PutnamBrew]

I didn’t know that there was a HERMs system for this size brew house. Interesting!

[@MadzP1992]

Hi. Love your channel. You said you dont let it ferment out, the fruit. Do you just put it in when its cold, do you add something to keep the yeast from eating the sugar or how do you regulate this so you dont produce bombs in cans/bottles. Or do you only keg?
Ty

[@thebeerjunkies1]

Thank you! I add 1/2 tsp per gallon of potassium sorbate and 1/4 tsp per 6 gallons of potassium metabisulphite to the fermenter at least 24 hours before cold crashing. These two additions prevent the yeast from reproducing and fermenting any added sugar. Once the potassium sorbate/metabisulfite have been in contact with the beer for at least 24 hours, you can add in your fruit without worrying about additional fermentation. I have only ever kegged my fruited beers, but it will work with bottling as it is the same technique used to backsweeten wine.

[@MrThesem]

Excellent!! That's a great beer to try out your on your new system. Curious, which yeast did you go with on this, WLP320?

[@thebeerjunkies1]

Thank you! We did use WLP320 for this batch. We have used WLP001 with this recipe before and can hardly tell a difference with the additional apricot flavor.

[@richardsanchez8808]

Hey man. I'm a hard soda maker and a tinkerer. I am currently making 100l of a 11% sugar fermentation. I am making a pumpkin spice hard soda and i was going to shoot the spices at it, but noticed they had emulsions too. Can you describe the strength compared to something like candy and drink flavoring? What would you do in this situation? I'm not used to using anything other than flavor concentrates in my sodas so I'm just winging it. Any help would be appreciated

[@thebeerjunkies1]

Thank you for the comment! Personally I haven’t used extracts or emulsions yet in any of my recipes, but emulsions are very similar in strength to extracts. They are two of the most concentrated flavorings you can use and are typically used at a rate of 0.25 grams per liter.
There are other flavorings such as purées that are typically not as strong as extracts and emulsions. For these fruit based flavorings, I typically use the brand Amoretti at a rate of 15 - 20 grams per liter.
If I were you, and I had the time, I would first brew a batch of the hard soda without any flavorings. Once it is finished, I would pour small samples, around 120 mL of soda into each of at least 6 - 8 glasses. I would add different amounts of flavoring into each glass to see what concentration you like best. Once you find your perfect ratio, you can extrapolate out for the whole batch. For example, if you like 0.05 mL of emulsion in your 120 mL glass, you would like around 42 mL in your 100l batch. This is the process I used when making my fruited wheat beer and lemonade shandy.
One word of caution though - some of the pre-mixed pumpkin spice flavorings I have tried have not been pleasant. They tend to use way too much cinnamon and it ends up reminding me of fireball. For my pumpkin beer, I used a ratio of 40:12:12 of ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger respectively in the boil for 5 minutes and it turned out great. I would be curious to hear how your soda turns out if you used the emulsion version of the pumpkin pie spices.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Cheers!

[@richardsanchez8808]

@@thebeerjunkies1 extracts are super easy. If you're bored and looking at making some sodas the mix is 10ml per liter of simple syrup. Simple syrup goes in at 100ml per liter of soda