Cherry Juice Concentrate Addition

[Bigbre04]

Ok I'll take your advise and prime them to 3, better safe than sorry. The plan is hopping to 7hbu. No preservatives in the concentrate, and good idea to throw it in the freezer for the couple weeks it'll take to ferment out. The juice mixed to label strength is quite sour as it is. Originally I was going to kettle sour and brew 5gal. but I want to try a more concentrated cherry flavor so I'm cutting the batch down to 2gal. The acid in the juice will make it plenty sour on its own., remember this is tart sour cherry juice. If you've ever eaten a fresh sour cherry you know they pack a punch. This is an experiment, albeit a bit of an expensive one at $33.00 a 32oz bottle of juice, but I'll take one for the team and let you know how it turns out.

sounds interesting. it is likely citric acid that is giving the sour. if you are interested in trying sour pitch this would be a good candidate. you wouldnt want to hop it though.

I would be surprised if the tartness carries through the beer. keep us posted on the progress.

Also what yeast are you using?

 

[Brewer #421120]

Okay so I finally finished by Cherry brew, you can look up the ingredients under my public recipe "Sour Cherry Bomb". I used 10lbs malt for 3.5 gallons. After recalculating the strength of the concentrated cherry juice, and what I needed to reserve for carbonating the bottles, I arrived at a 3.5 gallon batch to get the full original reconstitution of the concentrate. I fermented the wort for 1 week primary, then added the cherry concentrate and fermented out another week. RESULTS! I reserved enough concentrate to use as priming sugar calculating the grams of sugar on the label X ounces of finished beer to achieve 3 volumes.

1- I was very pleased with the tart cherry flavor! It definitely tastes just like the reconstituted juice alone and the flavor carries through completely.
2- It's been in the bottle about 6 weeks and is ready to drink, the cherry flavor has became more pure than after 1 week in the bottle.
3- It is quite sour, enough for my liking but I do think souring the mash and/or using a lacto or other lambic/souring yeast would ad more complexity.
The sour profile definitely rounded out more after 6 weeks in the bottle, but as one noted it is simply sour without the complexity of more traditional methods. It's a tasty brew and sour lovers should enjoy this one.
4- I was not able to create the sweetness I was going for by kicking up the grain bill as much as I would have liked, but it is not "dry". It is very good but I wanted to have more residual sweetness which I did not achieve. (I broke my hydrometer brew-day so I don't have numbers but it should be about 8% with the grain bill). I did a 2.5 hr boil to try and get a more pronounced sweetness, but will be looking at additional ways to sweeten this brew.


TAKEAWAY- I would definitely recommend using tart cherry concentrate, it was worth the price and tastes exactly like fresh tart cherries. I think it would be an excellent addition if you are making a Rodenbach Gran Cru. I'll be ordering more bottles and refining for improvements. Next time I'll sour the mash and use a complex souring yeast, and kick the grain bill up to barley wine levels.

Thanks for the input from those that followed this adventure I hope I was able to offer some helpful insight to the community to improve your brew.
I look forward to hearing your suggestions to improving the next batch.