I made my first sour beer over a year ago. About three months ago I split my 5 gallon batch into two 3 gal carboys, one with raspberries and the other I left plain. It is almost time to prime and bottle and I was wondering if anyone has any tips or tricks for racking beer off of fruit. After three months the raspberries are a mushy mess, I'm just imagining it will be hard to get the beer off the fruit.
I racked a sour off of cut-up peaches, sort of like the mushy mess you are talking about. I just held the racking cane above the point where it siphoned clear until I got to the cloudy part. It was not a hands-free operation, but as I had invested 3 years in the effort already, I didn't mind the extra 10 minutes.
I will normally also put the full fermentor up on my bar a couple days in advance, since moving it around is going to kick up some of the remnants no matter what. Once you're ready to bottle, just siphon slowly.
The other thing you could utilize if needed is a nylon paint strainer bag over your siphon tip. In this way you won't get fruit pieces clogging the siphon. I use a 1 gal bag (mostly for filtering dry hops).
