[brewmandan]

Hey all,

I have just made a Berliner Weiss, which is a sour beer recipe from the April/May issue of Zymurgy.  I soured the beer using a sour starter pre-fermentation.  I decided to bottle half of the beers, and send the other half into a secondary fermenter to add in some fresh fruit.  I bought some delicious strawberries from the farmers market, froze them to kill off harmful bacteria, and added them into the fermenter.

Anyway, it has been 2 days now and I have not seen any fermentation taking place.  I thought the sugar from the strawberries were fermentable, but I dont know.  Do I need to re-pitch some yeast to get things going?

Any comments/ideas would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

[morticaixavier]

did you thaw them before adding to the fermenter? are they whole or did you puree them? there are fermentable sugars in fruit so if you still have healthy yeast it should work on them. Was the beer really clear when you racked to secondary? It probably wouldnt' hurt to add more yeast but I will let more knowledgable folks chime in on that.

[brewmandan]

did you thaw them before adding to the fermenter? are they whole or did you puree them? there are fermentable sugars in fruit so if you still have healthy yeast it should work on them. Was the beer really clear when you racked to secondary? It probably wouldnt' hurt to add more yeast but I will let more knowledgable folks chime in on that.

I did not thaw the strawberries before adding into fermenter

They were chopped into smaller pieces to fit into the fermenter, but not pureed

The beer was not clear, but that is because of the Lactobacillus bacteria and not because of yeast (or so I think)

I will also add, the beer was fairly inactive (done fermenting) for about 5 or 6 days before I had time to add in the strawberries

[brewmandan]

Well the good news is I am finally starting to see some very slow bubbles come out of my airlock.  I apologize for the post, apparently I just did not wait long enough.   

[morticaixavier]

The frozen berries probably dropped the temp right down and put the little buggers to sleep for a while! Let me know how it turns out. It's an intruging idea. I think normally Berliner Weiss is flavored with syrups post fermentation (woodruff being common, and bright green which is always exciting!). Did you pasteurize after souring and before pitching yeast? or all all the critters in there together?