Naked Wheat
Probably in the next couple days I’ll be transferring my wheat beers over to secondary fermenters, and you know what that means right, fruit!?
Well, this time I am taking a different approach than I have in the past. Instead of actually adding canned fruit, or fruit puree, or whole fruit – this time I will be adding 100% fruit juice. Yeah, I know adding real fruit to the fermenter feels right, but I figured that really the juice is what’s going to do all of the work, so since I don’t have a juicer, it was time to find a source I was comfortable with. I was at the Newark Co-Op today and came across these “fresh” juices by a company called Naked Juice. Basically Naked Juice is just that, juice. Sure they made some that aren’t just juice, they have added vitamins and proteins and little helper-outers, but the ones that I chose were literally just juice. The only slight problem I could find with the juice was that it was flash pasteurized, so that could lend to a slight pectin haze, but really it’s a wheat beer – who cares. But on a positive note, because of the flash pasteurization, I know I won’t be adding any funky bugs either. Other than that, there is no preservatives, or additives, or extra sugar, or anything – nice.
The two juices I’m choosing to blend are Pomegranate Blueberry and Plentiful Pomegranate (which is a pomegranate raspberry blend). So I suppose it’ll then be a Pomegranate/Blueberry/Raspberry Wheat beer, but I think I’ll stick with just calling it a Pomegranate Wheat. I think Saranac makes a Pomegranate Wheat now that I think of it, oh well. According to the bottles each bottle contains at least a pound of fruit, so you figure I’m working with the potential of four pounds of fruit. The fruits and quantities listed on the bottles (all four together) break down like this: 13 pomegranates, 22 raspberries, 46 blueberries, 1 apple, and “white and red grapes for good measure”. Sounds good to me.
I may need to go and buy a wheat beer that I am guessing ours will be similar to, the un-fruited wheat that is, like Harpoon UFO or Magic Hat Circus Boy and do a little fruit juice testing on a sample before I start dumping away in the fermenter. Or not. We’ll see.