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Author Topic: Juice concentrate  (Read 8868 times)

Offline gmac

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Juice concentrate
« on: March 17, 2012, 01:36:08 pm »
I doubt anyone is going to know the answer to this but I'm going to ask anyway.  I have a wheat beer that is quite nice and want to make a fruit beer out of some of it.  My thought is to add 100% frozen juice concentrate blend to it and let it re-ferment.  The juice I want to try is blueberry/pomegranate.  Would anyone even want to hazard a guess at how much concentrate would be suitable in 1 gal?  I think I will probably end up doing some trial and error blending but the problem is, the character is going to change as i ferment the sugar in the juice.  I'm thinking 1/4 cup to start with.  I may take off 2 gals and do 1/4 cup and 1/2 cup concentrate and see what I end up with. 
Thoughts?

Offline EHall

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #1 on: March 17, 2012, 07:07:04 pm »
If I rember correctly, you add 2 full cans of water to the concentrate and it made something like a quart of juice.... so its concentrated down to a third of what it should be...you could either go with that as a starting number or run the test like you were already thinking...
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Offline gmac

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2012, 09:41:39 am »
Thanks but even if I made it into juice, I have no idea how much juice to add.  I want to make fruit beer, not wine so I think it's probably a pretty fine line between too much and too little. 
Any guess how much juice you would add per gallon? 

Offline EHall

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2012, 12:12:45 pm »
if you let it fully defrost it will be like a syrup... since it wont be as strong as a concentrate you might start off with 3-5oz and see how you like it... I really think you would fare better if you just bought a high quality extract and add it at bottling/kegging time...
Phoenix, AZ

Offline tschmidlin

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #4 on: March 18, 2012, 11:30:14 pm »
The way I think about it, you add 3x water to get juice.  How strong does the juice taste?  What if you add 8x the water?  20x?  How much juice flavor are you getting out of it?  How does that compare to the flavor of the base beer?

Adding 1/4 cup to 1 gallon is like diluting it with 64x the water.  I think at that level it will be subtle if you can even detect it, but I haven't had that juice.

A 12 oz can is 1.5 cups, added to a gallon (16 cups) it will be more than 10x dilution, or about 3x as dilute as intended.

A lot of it will depend on how strong you want the flavor to be, but I think even a whole can wouldn't be out of line.
Tom Schmidlin

Offline Jimmy K

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #5 on: March 19, 2012, 08:37:30 am »
Add the whole can and let it ferment. If it is too strong you can back-blend with pure wheat beer to dilute the flavor.
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Offline jakeamo

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2012, 01:02:15 am »
I did this to a cider, 1 can at kegging as priming sugar. It was awesome best cider ever. It also fermented out in the keg after a month, for what its worth. Watch out for sulfites on the label those are meant to kill yeast and stop the juice from turning to wine! I love to blend juices at kegging time on a whim. That black cherry stuff is awesome in a sour. If you read the sugar content on the package you can figure out how much to prime with. Juice is highly fermentable like corn sugar, for your calculations. Go for it

Offline gmac

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #7 on: March 29, 2012, 09:37:01 am »
I ended up doing 4 cans in a new 5 gal batch I had just started.  Colour is quite dark so far and it fermented like crazy, huge purple krausen.  I have a second 5 gals un-fruited so if it's too strong I can back blend and I kept back one juice in case it was a bit weak but I'm thinking based solely on appearance that its gonna be interesting.

Offline gmac

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Re: Juice concentrate
« Reply #8 on: April 24, 2012, 03:44:57 pm »
I ended up doing 4 cans in a new 5 gal batch I had just started.  Colour is quite dark so far and it fermented like crazy, huge purple krausen.  I have a second 5 gals un-fruited so if it's too strong I can back blend and I kept back one juice in case it was a bit weak but I'm thinking based solely on appearance that its gonna be interesting.

Just to follow up, this turned out quite well. Fruit presence is very obvious but not overpowering. I'd go with 3 cans for a more subtle flavour but 4 cans is good. My wife and her friends seem to really like it.