FOOLCiRCLE

Well, I transferred the American Brown Ales over to secondaries and decided I was going to twist one of the five gallon carboys.

With the ABA we brewed and fermented everything identically. So as to not have ten gallons of the same beer (without knowing what it was going to be like) I decided to twist half of the batch in the secondary fermenter. I added fresh peaches, now that’s a twist! I thought a darker brew with the bright sweetness of peaches sounded good to me, I hope I am right.

Originally I had planned on cutting and grilling the peaches to kill any bacteria and acquire all that lovely melanoidin grilled flavor and the syrupy goodness that would have came from the peaches. But at the last moment I remembered something about heat setting the pectins in fruit, or something like that, so that in homebrew the beer won’t fall clear. Not my biggest concern, but no one wants to drink a cloudy beer that is supposed to be clear.  So instead I decided on freezing the peaches in hopes of killing any bacteria and to help burst the cell walls of the fruit hopefully releasing even more fruity goodness.

So the original transfer date was to be Saturday, that fell through. Then Sunday, fell through too. Then Monday, instead was the day the peaches went into the freezer. So Tuesday morning the peaches came out of the freezer and into the fridge to thaw during the day. Tuesday night it was time to cube the peaches. They started as three pounds and ended as two and half after pitting them. After they were cubed I decided to take it one step further and pureed the peaches to hopefully have maximum peach exposure in the beer.

The peaches temped out very cold still, 34F to be exact, and I was going to wait to add the beer to them but I was already ready to go. So first I added the peaches to the carboy then racked the ABA on top of the peaches. I gave the carboy a quick stir twice while filling to try and keep the peaches in suspension. I then placed the airlock and have since walked away. I was expecting to see a noticeable secondary fermentation but have not seen much activity at all.

Hopefully this will turn out to be a good experiment. I have only had one real drain pour (Chocolate Covered Cherry Porter), one that kind of turned into a drain pour (The Enigma Stout), and a fifth of a batch that well . . . I saved some taste-buds by getting rid of that one (The Cocoa-Pebble Oatmeal Stout). Thinking back, it has been since 2002 since I made a beer with fruit in it with the Celebration Ale, WOW – 5 years ago!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.