Bottle priming with bananas?

Bottle priming with non-standard sugars is tricky. Tricky to get the amount of sugar right, tricky to predict the time it will take to ferment those sugars to completion. Furthermore, someone in the distant past (and probably near present, too) put hops in the bottle, reporting that solids in the bottle apparently have a tendency to act as nucleation points for CO2, causing the beer to release all it's CO2 at one time. How do you get the right amount of banana in each bottle? Doesn't sound easy. One way or another, I think you will mess your carbonation.

As for flavor, I don't know. I made a dubbel this winter in which I add 11 very ripe bananas to the mash. I could taste banana in the finished product, but it wasn't all I hoped for, taste-wise. It may be that the mash, the boil, and the fermentation transformed the banana in ways that do not happen in dry bananing, something about tasting banana but not getting the expected sweetness. The beer still sits in a keg waiting for me to dump it. Your mileage may vary. I recommend experimenting, to satisfy your curiosity, by doing this with the first 6 bottles you take from your bottling bucket. Then add priming sugar as normal to the remainder of the batch. You'll hedge your bets, end up mostly with an ordinary hefe that should be decent and 6 bottles of something unknown. If you love it, try full on the next time you brew a hefe.

 

Might be easier to blenderize them into a purée, Suger is very available then. Nucleation point can occur with excess hop material and fruit with my past beers. With a raspberry hefe, I had some pulp get into the bottles. Great flavor but had to pour the bottle into a large container then pour into a glass.

 

PLEASE, do this and report back.

No.

 

Anything is possible and should be. That's what homebrewing is for.
I'd certainly let the bananas get as much starch conversion out of the way before trying. But, just a casual glance around the interwebz shows me http://thepaleodiet.com/fruits-and-sugars/ and there is a lot of information around banana sugar content if you just copy and paste banana sugar content into your instant wisdom generator.
At 15.6 g per cup of them. It's going to get interesting and probably messy.
I hope you don't mind one bit dumping the whole thing.

 

I wasn't originally going to weigh in on this but I changed my mind. I think that priming with bananas is a bad choice. There are way too many possibilities for things to go wrong, and I am certainly not a big fan of exploding bottles (been there, done that)!

But I think adding banana juice to the fermentation might be interesting. I was once fascinated by a banana lambic from De Troch that later fell under the Chapeau name. I contacted them and learned that they pressed bananas in a cider press to make the banana juice for it. You don't even have to do that now as banana juice can be found on your grocers shelves (at least at Whole Foods).

My only question then is what difference will it make? If you choose the right yeast (I forget what I used to use) and ferment it warm enough you'll get all of the banana you need! Then the banana in the fermentation becomes excessive/redundant/unnecessary. And that brings me right 'round to the original idea... what would adding bananas as priming sugar do other than adding a bit of gimmick to it? But if you want to do that, at least add it upfront.

 

Everything about this just seems like a bad idea to me. Were it I, I would just rack onto the bananas in secondary for a period of time then bottle as normal. For the sake of science, maybe do a couple bottles in the way you described just to see what happens.

 

This would be my assertion, as well, and is probably why adding bananas to beer hasn't become a bigger "thing". Just get a yeast strain that is a big isoamyl acetate producer and you have your banana character right there. No fruit necessary.

 

This reminds me of that dude mashing an entire pumpkin pie.

 

That would be WORLDS better than putting a pumpkin pie in your bottles to prime them, though.

 

Bananas in the bottle? That scares me. But bananas in secondary, that's another thing:

https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/cocoa-banana-sweet-stout-all-grain.386645/

 

At HomebrewCon this year, there was apparently a guy who racked his beer onto an entire pan of brownies in secondary. People do odd things to beer.

 

Until someone who has already added bananas to beer chimes in to say that the flavor is really like a banana flavor and not some sort of flavor that isn't even close to correct, I'd hold off doing this. (And especially I'd hold off adding the bananas to the bottle for priming because of the unpredictability of how much sugar is present.) Let the yeast be the ones to add the banana flavor. I'm just not a believer that any specific ingredient will always give off the best representative flavor of itself.

But someone has to be first and report their findings.

 

I can't wait to hear how this goes. Please report back. Be sure to put the bottles inside of something while they ferment, because I wouldn't be surprised one bit if you get a few explosions.

 

I'm sure you'll have the time of your life cramming smashed up banana in bottle after bottle. Good luck with that! Cheers

 

See my link above. ~2 lbs per gallon (pre-peeled weight) worked for me. I wanted real banana flavor without the phenols that come along with hefe strains, and it worked great.

I still wouldn't jam bananas into bottles though.

 

Sounds bananas to me. *rimshot*
Seriously, this is asking for disappointment. If you're not getting enough banana (to your liking) on a Hefeweizen, you need to key that in (grist,mash schedule, pitch rate, fermentation temperature/schedule). Adding bananas seems bush league.

 

I think you need to shoot for liquidized banana as much as possible. Get very ripe bananas and keep the strings out (bitter). Run them through blender and then a sieve. Hopefully at this point you somehow get close to a liquid. Then can use refractometer to calculate how much is need for priming. Finally, I would mix into full volume of the beer being bottled in a bottling bucket or keg. Doing it bottle by bottle will inevitably lead to inconsistency.

Actually, do you keg? This would be a lot easier if you keg. Just put mashed banana in a hop sack and naturally carbonate in the keg. Can adjust pressure as needed. I do that all the time with weird fruit additions.