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Hey folks. I have a parti gyle brew day coming up. The big beer is a smash dipa using 2 row and Amarillo. Smasharillo! The second beer will, hopefully, be a mild/ bitter using Wyeast London ESB yeast. I'd like to sour it up with some grapefruit. I'll probably add some rind to the boil and maybe even some juice to bump up the o.g. A bit but I don't want to lose all the flavour during fermentation. So my question is this: if I rack to secondary and then add some fruit and/ or juice will it ferment out? Or does enough yeast get left behind that it's not an issue? I've done some reading about killing the yeast after fermentation but is this a good idea? What if I put the juice right in the keg? Will this kickstart another fermentation? I'd love to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks!

Mike

MikeMorrison wrote:Hey folks. I have a parti gyle brew day coming up. The big beer is a smash dipa using 2 row and Amarillo. Smasharillo! The second beer will, hopefully, be a mild/ bitter using Wyeast London ESB yeast. I'd like to sour it up with some grapefruit. I'll probably add some rind to the boil and maybe even some juice to bump up the o.g. A bit but I don't want to lose all the flavour during fermentation. So my question is this: if I rack to secondary and then add some fruit and/ or juice will it ferment out? Or does enough yeast get left behind that it's not an issue? I've done some reading about killing the yeast after fermentation but is this a good idea? What if I put the juice right in the keg? Will this kickstart another fermentation? I'd love to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks!

Mike

I add fruit to the secondary and it starts a second fermentation - guessing that adding to the keg will do the same.

So do you lose all of the fruit flavour as a result?

No still tons of flavor by adding to secondary.

LeafMan has it right here. Adding juice after primary will definitely start a second fermentation unless you pasteurize or otherwise go to great lengths to get rid of the yeast. However, since the overall concentration of fermentable sugar will be low it will be a relatively calm fermentation that will drive off very little flavour.

Wine, mead and cider makers use metabisulfite to stop fermentation which allows adding honey and juice into secondary. I've never done it with beer.


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Thanks for the feedback. After some more thought and research my plan is to add some rind and fruit near the end of the boil then do a two stage fermentation with some fruit in the secondary. When the Gravity is where I want I'll cold crash it to quiet down the yeast and then keg it. If it needs more flavour I'll add some grapefruit juice right to the keg. It'll be an experiment for sure. Hopefully it turns out!

How did this experiment turn out? Did you modify it any further?

I had intended to follow up on this but it slipped my mind. This experiment turned out great. Here's what I ended up doing. I added grapefruit rind and freshly squeezed juice to the last 10 minutes of the boil. After primary fermentation with Wyeast London ESB I split the batch, half on lemon and ginger and the other half on the meat of 2 red grapefruits for secondary. I bottled the lemon ginger and kegged the grapefruit and added a bottle of ruby red grapefruit juice to the keg. We still have a few bottles of the lemon ginger left and it is very crisp, mild and refreshing. The grapefruit was off the charts delicious! A great hot weather beer to be sure. A bit like a Radler I guess. They worked out to be somewhere in the vicinity of 3% ABV. I'll be brewing another version of the grapefruit next week but aiming for about 4.5%. Hopefully we'll get some warm weather by the time it's ready!

Awesome, thanks for the info!