Beer Forum

I am going to bottle (750ML) a Belgian White and was thinking of adding 1 raspberry and 1 cherry to each bottle. Would there be enough sugar to condition the beer just using one of each or would I have to add priming sugar as well? If I add the priming sugar should I back off on the amount a little to compinsate for the cherry and rasberry I am putting in each bottle?

Thanks and Cheers

It all depends on the extract potential of the fruit that you're using. When bottle conditioning with corn sugar, the advice to put in 4 oz gets you basically a 0.002 increase in specific gravity. You could in principle measure the extract potential of your fruit. The real worry that I woul have when adding fruit to the bottles is bacterial contamination. If you introduce a bug that it more attenuative than your yeast, you may have bottle bombs. If I was going to try this method, I would at least boil the fruit before adding it to the bottles, or, better yet, make a slurry and add it to the bottling bucket.

Max

*most* fruit is roughly 10% sugar by weight (this varies, you can look up nutrition info on your particular fruit). You'll need about 2.5g of sugar per bottle to get to 2.6 volumes, assuming .85 volumes residual CO2. So that means 25g, or roughly an ounce of fruit is needed per bottle, assuming all the sugar in the fruit is made available to the yeast. If it's whole fruit, all the sugar may not be made available and you'd be left with less carbonation than desired.

I've had a couple of beers given to me that had fruit in the bottom, it can turn out pretty nasty. The fruit gets real soft and loses its color, sometimes dissolving and giving you a big mess of funk at the bottom of the bottle even if it doesn't necessarily taste bad. I suggest you skip the fruit in the bottle and just add it to the glass at serving if you're going for whole fruit. If you're interested in crushed fruit, it would be better to add that to the fermenter and let it finish out so you have the color and flavor pickup but not the spent fruit husk.

Reading this thread made me think of botulism. If you put a piece of fruit (that has not been heated or acidified to kill bacteria) into a sealed container with no oxygen you run the risk of fatal botulism poisoning. Bacteria can multiply four times faster than yeast. If there were Clostridium botulinum spores present, they could produce a fatal dose of toxin. That said, I wondering if soaking the cherry in vodka or whiskey in the refrigerator would kill all the bugs...

Thank you all for the replys. I ended up not adding fruit to the bottles.

Beer Baron wrote:Reading this thread made me think of botulism. If you put a piece of fruit (that has not been heated or acidified to kill bacteria) into a sealed container with no oxygen you run the risk of fatal botulism poisoning. Bacteria can multiply four times faster than yeast. If there were Clostridium botulinum spores present, they could produce a fatal dose of toxin. That said, I wondering if soaking the cherry in vodka or whiskey in the refrigerator would kill all the bugs...

The bacteria that causes botulism does not grow well below pH 4.6, and most beer is between 3.8 and 4.4 pH. I don't think botulism would a concern in beer. Adding the fruit is moot, we do not heat work high enough to kill the spores anyway, so if it were a real issue you'd see cases of botulism poisoning from bottled beer.

Nyakavt wrote:

Beer Baron wrote:Reading this thread made me think of botulism. If you put a piece of fruit (that has not been heated or acidified to kill bacteria) into a sealed container with no oxygen you run the risk of fatal botulism poisoning. Bacteria can multiply four times faster than yeast. If there were Clostridium botulinum spores present, they could produce a fatal dose of toxin. That said, I wondering if soaking the cherry in vodka or whiskey in the refrigerator would kill all the bugs...

The bacteria that causes botulism does not grow well below pH 4.6, and most beer is between 3.8 and 4.4 pH. I don't think botulism would a concern in beer. Adding the fruit is moot, we do not heat work high enough to kill the spores anyway, so if it were a real issue you'd see cases of botulism poisoning from bottled beer.

+1

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/22/6/1025.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC239606/

It is generally agreed upon that no know human pathogen can survive, in sufficient quantity, to cause illness in people. So drink up, it's safer than water!

KimJongAle wrote:

Nyakavt wrote:

Beer Baron wrote:Reading this thread made me think of botulism. If you put a piece of fruit (that has not been heated or acidified to kill bacteria) into a sealed container with no oxygen you run the risk of fatal botulism poisoning. Bacteria can multiply four times faster than yeast. If there were Clostridium botulinum spores present, they could produce a fatal dose of toxin. That said, I wondering if soaking the cherry in vodka or whiskey in the refrigerator would kill all the bugs...

The bacteria that causes botulism does not grow well below pH 4.6, and most beer is between 3.8 and 4.4 pH. I don't think botulism would a concern in beer. Adding the fruit is moot, we do not heat work high enough to kill the spores anyway, so if it were a real issue you'd see cases of botulism poisoning from bottled beer.

+1

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/22/6/1025.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC239606/

It is generally agreed upon that no know human pathogen can survive, in sufficient quantity, to cause illness in people. So drink up, it's safer than water!

OK, the citations convinced me that botulism is highly unlikely, but I still think a whole piece of raw fruit on the bottom of a bottle of beer is going to rot from some sort of bacteria and turn into squish.