Brewing With Blueberries

[Beagle Brewing]

Good day all,

a few questions about brewing with blueberries (BB).

I'm a small nano brewery in Australia. Got access to some free BB so free is good right ? I'm planning to make a BB ale, so nothing too fancy probably just based off Maris Otter. I'm planning to put BB in my kettle just about 10 mins before end of boil (this is due to the unique nature of my single vessel setup). So I figure 10 mins would be enough to "sterilize" them, break them down and bring out their color in the batch. My batch size is 450 L (119 gal) and thought I would add 10 kg of BB which is 22 lbs.

Questions:

1) will BB lower pH excessively and require compensation ?
2) will BB (at 2% conc) affect beer foam significantly and if so ideas to compensate
3) I see that BB are mostly fructose and glucose and galactose, up to about 15-20 mg / gram (ppm) I think none of these are fermental by say California ale yeast yeh ?

All thoughts welcome

Cheers Michael at Beagle Brewing Co Australia

 

[McMullan]

I brew a seasonal ale or two using the wild blueberries from our garden and surrounding forest most years. They have a wonderful flavour, but subtle and delicate, imo. And wild blueberries pack a lot more flavour than the commercially grown ones. At about 2% in your recipe, you'll be wasting blueberries, imho. Use a lot more. More like 20%. My best advice is put the blueberries in a secondary vessel then rack the beer on top after primary fermentation finishes. Don't worry about sanitising the berries, just use a few freeze-thaw cycles to mash them open. Both fructose and glucose are fermentable by pretty much most yeast. Most living things, in fact.

 

[BeerSmith]

Hi,
I've worked extensively with fruit - mostly making meads but also some beers:

1. BB typically won't lower the pH much as they don't have much acidity. Fruits with higher acidity like currants have a much bigger pH punch.
2. I don't think you will see a big foam impact either as fruit is mostly sugar.
3. Just about any yeast will readily ferment the simple sugars in blueberries. As it will ferment most of the sugars, the largest portion of remaining flavor post-fermentation comes from the tannins in the skins.

My experience with blueberries is that they are pretty subtle in terms of flavor because the inside of the berry is all sugar, and the skins have tannins but not nearly as much as many other berries. So you actually need a fairly large amount of berries to get a big impact.

 

[BrewCat]

you will get blue color maybe
make them into a blueberry "cider" or sparkling wine
I use 1lb blueberries per gallon of wine to bring out any flavor so you would need probably 100lbs blueberries