[This article is part of a series on brewing with special ingredients. The introduction covered background material and the second installment covered sugars. This installment will span two articles and cover fruits.]
Making a fruit beer is easy, especially if you understand your ingredients.
If you have a garden or orchard on your property, or just live near a good farmer’s market, chances are you’ve thought about combining your love of brewing with some of nature’s bounty. In the right kind of beer, fruit can make a nice complement. Sour beers are an especially nice host for fruit flavors; but basically any kind of beer that isn’t too hoppy could be made into a fruit beer. Adding fruit to your beer, in a way that preserves the fresh fruit flavors and aromas, is straightforward. As always, understanding a little about an ingredient will help you
When most people think of fruits, they think of sweet fleshy foods, usually containing seeds, that come from trees, bushes or other plants. These include apples, stone fruits (cherries, peaches), berries (strawberries, raspberries), melons, dates and many others. The botanical definition of fruits is different, and broader, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll use the “kitchen” definition.
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