Ruby's Ruby

Raspberries+Wheat beer=Ruby's Ruby

Here is the result of adding .6 kg of raspberries to +/-17L of wheat beer.

Ruby!

It's a bit more grapefruit colored than it looks in the above pic. I'm getting a LOT of nice raspberry in the nose (too much, some would say), but not as much on the palate. The aroma is quite sweet as well, but the flavor is fairly dry. There was some sourness at first that played well with the initial sweetness, but both of those have diminished, leaving a dry, just slightly puckering sensation that when mingled with the aroma, proves to be a really nice (though admittedly girly) kind of summer time quaff. I proposed scaling back the berries by a third, but she-who-must-be-obeyed said hell no, leave it the way it is. It is supposed to be her beer after all, so I comply.

I added .6 kg, frozen and partially thawed raspberries to a bottling bucket, then mashed with a sanitized potato masher. Racked off of primary onto that and let it sit four days at 20C before kegging. Got a lot of raspberry gunk that came through the siphon; most of it stayed floating on top, some of it sunk to the bottom, and a lot of it hung around in suspension. Result is the same situation applies in the keg (and the glass), and I'm gonna have a bitch of a time cleaning that poppet probably. Anyhoo, calling it mostly a success but the urge to tweak it is definitely there.

A brewer friend says to freeze the berries, then put in a pyrex cup, add just enough boiling water to cover, then chuck it into the fermenter and rack on top of it. The freezing bursts the cell walls, but leaves the berry cone intact, so you get the juiciness without the gunkiness. The boiling sanitizes the berries of any micro-critters that may have survived freezing. Will give that a shot next time.