Fruit addition to saison

I would not use pits if going with peach or apricot. Both can give a pretty strong almond aroma that might mess with your fruit profile. As for how to treat the fruit -- depends on your goal. Unsanitized, fresh will give you a very good chance of adding some bugs, if that's not your goal you can try a star-san wash + freezing. I've been leaving my beers on the fruit for 2 months, seems to be working well.

 

No pits, the almond flavor @atpca is referring to is cyanide. You will lose a lot of volume to the fruits BTW. 3 gallons could end up being 1 gallon of beer.

 

Is there some reason you want to have the beer on the fruit for a few months? The sugars will be fermented and the flavors extracted long before that. And I can't imagine the fruit carcasses left behind doing anything good during that time.

 

I've heard anywhere from 2-4 lbs/gallon. 4 seems incredibly high to me, but so far my only finished fruit beer was about 1 lb/gallon of cherries, which provided both a) not a whole lot of cherry flavor and b) a lot of sugar that really dried out the beer (in a style that should have been sweeter). So, there's a real balancing act you have to do.

I have a sour currently aging on just over 2 lbs/gallon of sweet and Rainier cherries. I have high hopes, since it's supposed to be a pretty dry beer anyway.

 

Which fruit or fruits are you wanting to add?

 

Just had a Brett Blonde that was conditioned on 36 oz raspberries for 2 weeks. Turned out perfect amount of raspberry. At ~7 oz/gal of raspberries. This is probably a much lower ratio than less potent fruits like peach and apricot.

 

Oh no, it's a GREAT idea. Probably my favorite homebrews!

 

It probably varies by type of fruit and by how you prepare it. But I recently used raspberries and a week was plenty. I should add that the raspberries were frozen, thawed, and slightly crushed (just by squeezing the ziplocks they had been thawed in).

 

For reference, Fou Foune is ~1.5lb of Apricots per gal of beer bottled

 

Depends on what you're going for too, I usually want the bugs off the fresh fruit I add. 2 months seems to be "accepted practice" at a couple of lambic breweries (see http://cantillon.be/br/3_107) so I decided to copy. You could probably get away with less but 2mo on fruit & 2 mo in bottle before tasting has worked pretty well for me so far.

 

The cyanide/almond flavor is critical to a good kriek, IMO. Not so much to a peach/apricot beer. It's not *much* either, but my current apricot beer is ~150+ apricots so I guess it would add up. Roasted & cracked they make a mean ice cream, and I'm going to try for a home made amaretto this year.

 

You definitely want room for the fruit and additional headroom for the secondary fermentation that is going to happen. I'd recommend at least 25% additional headspace above your filled (including fruit) level, i.e. treat it like a primary from that perspective.

 

Fair enough. But OP mentioned sanitizing his fruit, so I assume he's not trying to culture bugs from it.

 

This! Twice! My first apricot beer was a real gusher. FIlled the airlock with vigor.

 

Not adding too much to what others have said, but going with a saison, I'd recommend between 1-2 pounds of the fruit, depending on which you use. For stone fruits, I'd definitely remove the pits for a saison, or you could leave in a small amount (1/4 of the pits?) if you want a bit of additional woody, nutty complexity. The only one that I would definitely recommend working on the low end of this range would be plum, as the skins can provide a decent amount of tannins, which could become distracting and take over the beer at a level near 2lb/gallon.

For a style that can handle Brett, lactic acid bacteria, and other critters well, I would only recommend washing the fruit before halving or chopping to get it into the beer. I don't think there's any realistic chance that this will make the beer undrinkable, as the bugs will also be competing with the existing Saccharomyces left in the beer, and won't really do too much on their own, instead mostly just adding accents. If you want some "wild" character earlier on, you could always intentionally add some Brett/bugs now (commercial culture, Orval dregs, JP dregs). Jolly Pumpkin dregs are generally quite fast-acting.

On timing, a month should be plenty, especially if you chop up the fruit rather than just halving it, as that'll give the yeast better access to the fruit. If I recall correctly, things like smashing and/or freezing to damage cell walls is more important with only Saccharomyces, as it can't break down the outer skins of the fruits like Brett and other bugs can. Of course, when potentially dealing with Brett and other bugs, smashing will certainly speed up the process.

Cheers!