Adding fruit juice to secondary

Post #1 made 9 years ago
I decided to try and brew a fruit beer. Don't get me wrong here I love a face-puckering hoppy kick in the mouth as much as the next guy, but I appreciate most styles of beer and like a fruit beer once in a while, as long as it isn't sweet and still tastes like beer.

I actually even enjoy a Sam Adams Cherry Wheat once in a while :sneak: , so I decided to brew something along that profile with a simple 45% 2row, 45% wheat and 10% munich grain bill and just a bit of tettnang.

My original plan was to add cherries to a secondary fermentor and rack the beer onto them after primary ferment was complete. Then somewhere in between I decided to try blueberries instead and shortly thereafter (reading that 2 pounds per gallon are usually required and seeing the price of 12 pounds of blueberries :argh: ) I decided to use blueberry juice. I got 2 litres of pure organic - no additive - not from concentrate - blueberry juice from the health food store (still $$$ but not as bad as 12 pounds of berries) and racked the beer onto it in a secondary fermenter after primary completed.

I realize that a smart brewer probably would have taken a gravity reading after primary ferment, after adding juice, and after secondary, but I didn't think of it until after all that. I bottled it last night since the gravity was down to 1.008-ish, which I didn't think was possible with wlp001. Anyway, it tasted absolutely awesome, like an american wheat with a nice hint of blueberry pie, and not too sweet even with the added corn sugar, so I'm really hoping it keeps the blueberry flavour after conditioning.

Now after such a long ramble, I was wondering how or if something like this might be accounted for in the biabacus? I figure if I wanted to work out how much extra abv it added I would probably need those gravity readings, or I suppose I could do some fancy math and knowing the amount of sugar in the juice probably get an idea. Just wondering if anyone has done similar brews and whether they accounted for it in biabacus somewhere or if they lean more toward the Bobbrews kind of approach I took here... :lol:
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Post #2 made 9 years ago
goulaigan,

My approach is simple like me. Just remember that blueberry beer will stain your shirt and whatever else you spill it on? Since I don't use any software anymore I can't help with BIABacus but I thought I just saw something on that here? Good luck in "Cheese" Friday!
tap 1 Raspberry wine
tap 2 Bourbon Barrel Porter
tap 3 Czech Pilsner
tap 4 Triple IPA 11% ABV

Pipeline: Mulled Cider 10% ABV

http://cheesestradamus.com/ Brewers challenge!
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Post #3 made 9 years ago
goulaigan wrote:...I was wondering how or if something like this might be accounted for in the biabacus?
I love questions like this because they help me procrastinate on writing help for the BIABAcus :).

There's two ways I can see it handling it actually but the best way would be (using Pr1.3T or later) to treat the blueberry juice as a boil addition. (The only penalty in treating it as such is that your GAW and OG estimates will assume you have added the juice during the boil.)

Anyway, you would then need to read the label of the juice and work out the pure sugar content by weight and put that into Section Y with zero percent moisture content. Then in Section W, if you added say 2 litres of the juice, you would type 2 into 'Water Added During the Boil.'

Make sense?

Further maths would be needed if you did want to know your estimated GAW and OG but, regardless, whichever way you go, you would have to get the sugars by weight from the container.

:peace:
Last edited by PistolPatch on 20 Aug 2014, 21:17, edited 1 time in total.
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Post #4 made 9 years ago
Excellent PP, I figured there was a way. I haven't actually used too many of those extra sections in Biabacus since the necessary ones and the defaults are all I have required so far to make what I consider to be some really great and predictable beer.

Your suggestion makes sense and I will follow it if this beer turns out as good as it was on bottling day and I brew it again. Think I still have the containers actually so I could probably play around with my file as it is too...

Anyway, please feel free to ignore my posts from here on out, I don't want to be a procrastination enabler! And thanks again. :lol:

Edit: And thanks to you as well Bob, sound advice as always, hadn't even considered the shirt factor! :lol:
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