Brian’s Beer

The idea for this beer came from Lauren who, when asked what kind of beer she’d like to make, answered “Strawberry!” I did some research about how to do this and found that a beer light in color and flavor would do the best job at bringing out strawberry flavor. I also learned that strawberries are a mild flavor and that to get any kind of flavor out of them, you need about 2 lbs of strawberries per gallon of beer. Since we brew in five gallon batches that means we need 12lbs of strawberries.

Yeah. I know 5×2=10, but they were 3lbs for $5 so I got 12lbs. Plus, we’d be cutting the tops off and some packs would likely have a moldy one or two so this way we’d be sure to have 10lbs. I want to know there’s strawberry in this beer.

While I cleaned and sanitized the equipment we’d be using, Lauren cut the tops off the berries. She thought they looked neat in the bowl.

I then took them for a spin in the food processor and dumped them into a pot on the stove.

We brought the puree up to 170 degrees and kept it there for a few minutes to kill off any yeasts or bacteria that might be hanging out. Then we cooled it down to about 100 so that it didn’t overwhelm the yeast in the beer. Once we got too hungry to wait for the puree to cool, we funneled the lot of it into the carboy.

And we prepared to funnel the beer that had been fermenting for a week on top of the strawberry puree.

I really thought that we’d literally be siphoning the beer on TOP of the strawberry puree, but as you can tell from this next picture, the puree is lighter than the beer.

I wonder why? I think maybe the process of blending the strawberries in the food processor along with stirring in the pot added a lot of air into it. At this point I am worried that the beer won’t have a lot of access to the strawberries. Though honestly, it’s the same amount of access that it would have had had the beer been on top of the berries, so I guess it will all be okay.

From here I moved the carboy back into the bucket, added a few gallons of cold water, put the wet shirt back on (the shirt keeps light away from the beer and also helps cool down the beer).

And that’s it! A week of this, and the beer gets tranferred off of the strawberries and yeast poop and into a third vessel where it will sit a few days so more goop can fall out of solution and then it gets moved to the keg to carbonate and eventually be poured. I figure it will be ready in two weeks.