Cherry Mama

It's been 3 weeks since I brewed Your Mom, the dry Irish stout. I have ten gallons of the stuff. This is where the two halves of the batch diverge. One half I kegged as is (hit a FG of 1.012, expected 1.013). That will go into the Nitrog-inator once I get the nitrogen cylinder filled. It should be ready to drink well before St. Patty's day. But the other half's destiny lies elsewhere.

Cherries, meet stout.

One of the benefits of doing a ten gallon batch is that you can get two full kegs of beer in one slightly longer brew day. Since the wort goes into two separate fermentors (for me at least, I don't yet have a fermentor that can do all ten gallons at once), once it's out of the boil kettle, they don't even have to wind up being the same beer. Ferment one as an ale and one as a lager. Use two slightly different yeasts to see how they differ. Dry hop one of them. Two beers for the price of one!

In this case, I had a 3 pound bag of dark tart cherries in my freezer that I bought at Costco with some sort of beer plan in mind. I had thought maybe a cherry Berliner Weisse, but I haven't yet worked up the nerve to do a sour. I figured it was time they got used. So they're going in the stout.

Destined for something greater.

I've done a few fruit beers before, with varying success. My first brew (ever!) was, in fact, an apricot wheat beer. It used apricot extract at bottling. While overall the beer was a success (especially for a first brew), the apricot taste was pretty underwhelming and a bit artificial. Since then I've only ever used real fruit. I did a raspberry cream ale that came out really well (and extremely raspberry-y), and a blackberry cream ale that came out slightly less well due to having flavor and aroma hops that clashed with the fruit flavor. I cut them in half from the original recipe, but I should have omitted them altogether. One of my first all-grain batches was a new apricot wheat beer, based on Jamil Zainasheff's recipe, and using canned, strained, and pureed apricots. That one turned out amazing with an almost overwhelming apricot flavor.

3 pounds of cherries.

Frozen fruit is great because it keeps well until you're ready to use it, and the freezing ruptures the cell walls, making it easier for your beer to extract the fruit flavors and colors. I also didn't bother with smashing or blending the cherries in any way, since they were already pitted and I figured that probably provided enough surface area. If you're using other, larger whole fruits, you probably want to smash them up, stick them in a food processor, or something like that to provide more surface area. Many people say you can add fruit directly into the primary—every time you move your beer you're giving it more chances to get oxidized or infected. I wanted to rack the beer on top of the fruit, to separate the beer from the trub (so less winds up in the final keg), and to get my fermentor back. So I used a 5-gallon secondary (to limit the empty headspace).

I was momentarily worried about my choice to leave so little headspace, but there's not a ton of sugar in the cherries, so I don't think it will blow off. I'll know pretty soon, though, because within minutes, the airlock was bubbling. Historically I've left beers on fruit for 4-6 weeks, to make sure to get as much of the flavor as possible.  The beer tends to suck all the color out of fruit as well, leaving a bunch of floating white raspberries or blackberries. I will probably just leave this one until I'm done drinking the un-fruited stout, then put it on the nitro as well.

Bubbling already!