Cherry Stout Racking

Today marked 8 weeks of the cherry stout ("Cherry Mama") sitting on the cherries. I figured it might be time to rack it off. I'd opened the fermenter a couple of times to see what was going on and to make sure there wasn't a pellicle or something funky developing on the top, and there was definitely a strong aroma of cherry. I've never left fruit in for that long, but everything looked fine when I opened it up, although there were still bubbles coming from the cherries. I'm not sure what that means, I guess I didn't puree or smash up the cherries, so it is possible that the yeast were still getting to some of the sugars inside. The cherries were frozen, though, which should rupture the cell walls and help with flavor and color extraction.

Speaking of color extraction, the stout, which was very clear despite being very dark, had a really nice red hue to it, much more than I would have expected. I also managed to get a tiny taste of what was left in the autosiphon when I finished racking, and it definitely tastes like cherry, but not at all sweet. The first fruit beer I made with real fruit was a raspberry cream ale and I distinctly recall the first time I tried it thinking that it tasted very strongly of raspberries, but not at all sweet. So much of what I think of as "cherry" flavor is sweetness that at first I couldn't place the flavor, but really is all the essence of cherry minus the sugar. It's still very much a dry stout.

Once I had racked off all the beer, I noticed that the cherries were distinctly less red than they had been when I put them in. They were still dark, though, unlike the raspberries in the aforementioned cream ale, which came out almost white. I'm guessing that the darkness of the beer helped keep them looking dark. Unable to resist the temptation, I grabbed one of the cherries and ate it. It tasted like stout. As much as the beer tasting like cherries was noticeable, it seems that the flavor of the entire beer/cherry system had homogenized. So the cherry just... tasted exactly like the beer. which for a beer is pretty cherry-ish, but for a cherry, is not very cherry-ish at all. Weird. I'm probably going to evict my Irish Red, which I was never really happy with and put this on the nitro next to the Your Mom and then maybe do some side-by-side tasting notes.