A friend is home from University in Montreal where she has fallen in love with St. Ambroise Apricot Wheat and wants to know if I can make something similar. Since I also really like that beer, I'm gonna give it a try. But, I'm unsure what the best strategy is to infuse the apricot into the beer.
http://mcauslan.com/en/beer-facts/?brand=st-ambroise-en&id=447Also, notice that this starts at 15.5 plato (1.062) but ends at 5% so it must be fairly low attenuation. Any suggestions on a yeast that would be a good starting point for this? I'm thinking WLP002 might be a possibility but I'm not sure where to start.
A couple years ago, I tried something like this by putting 1 gal of wheat beer onto pureed apricots. The taste was ok but I bottled it and because it had some apricot puree that got siphoned into the bottles during the process, the apricot provided nucleation points and each bottle gushed terribly. It wasn't really over carbonated and it wasn't contaminated so I'm pretty sure it was the apricot like I said.
Any thoughts on a better strategy to make this work? I'm doing all 15 gal batches now so I'd probably do a big batch of wheat and then do at least 10 gals in secondary with fruit under the assumption that if it works, I'd want a decent amount to have on hand for the whole summer.
Please let me know what you all think.
Thanks