Cedar Rapids Brewing Society

How long do you guys leave your fruit and beer together when making fruit beers? I put my batch of american wheat on 4 lbs of peaches last night. Should I be looking for a change in gravity, or take samples until the flavor seems right? Never done this before, and I don't want to waste the batch. I am assuming the fruit will go bad at some point.

The instructions that I got with my NB kit last year said to leave it on the fruit in the secondary for a month. I actually kept it on the fruit for about 5 weeks.

I did a final gravity at bottling/kegging and it was not changed from when I racked it from the primary. However, the instructions said to watch for reactivated fermentation and to have a blowoff tube ready, just in case.

Good luck!

Since the beer is already fermented and there is alcohol in it, no other bacteria (at least not much) can infect the beer at this point. As long as you keep it sealed you should be good. Good luck.

The fruit can reactivate the beer, certain fruits high in natural sugars are more likly to cause this for example (pinapple). however, they do not lend much to the furmentation process so the activation and additional fermentation should not be long or very intense.

Also as Larry pointed out with the beer already being fermented the you should not have to worry about the the fruit going bad inside. If you haven't already added the fruit, one thing I like to do is cut up the fruit and boil it is small amounts of water this helps assure that it is sanitized and then I just add the water and fruit into the secondary. This does lower your ABV a little bit with the added water. However, I find that this also helps exract the fruit flavors and add them to the beer.