Attempted Fruit IPA gone wrong

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Whytie

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Hi all,

I'm a new member and new to home brewing this year, ive got a few successful extract/partial mash brews under my belt but still learning the ropes.

About a month and half ago I thought I'd try my hand at brewing an IPA. I like IPAs that have a bit of a tropical hit to them, so I wanted to try and brew something along those lines.

Long story short I brewed my IPA, 5 US gal/20 liter batch, but after primary fermentation I split the batch, bottled half of it, but let the other half sit in secondary with a big bag of fruit in it. I think I used quite a liberal amount of fruit, I forgot to write down the exact weight but for a quick breakdown I used an entire pineapple, a mango, a papaya and 4 passion-fruits.

So I let this sit for ten days, then bottled it, and let it condition for a month.
Popped open the first bottle the other day, and it was very bad. It was really quite sour, almost like a lambic but really bad, I would even go as far as to say undrinkable.

The other half of the batch, that was bottled straight after primary, I am really pleased with and is actually pretty good. So obviously something happened in secondary to ruin the beer, naturally my first thought is I've used too much fruit and maybe the acidity of the fruit has ruined things. I optimistically wondered if maybe the bottle I had used still had some yeast stuck at the bottom from a previous brew, which had then ruined that bottle during conditioning, so i tried a second bottle, and of course that bottle was off too.

So I just wanted to post up and find out if any of you kind people have had similar experience when brewing fruit beers, or may have some insight into whats happened to my IPA, am I right in thinking I just used too much fruit?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the essay
 
done two fruit ipa's admittedly only by an extract kit but used frozen fruit from somewhere like asda as a kind of dry hop about a week after fermentation.had no problems with it and liked the blueberry one I did.ive just kegged a mango one which im not so sure about though
 
Cheers for the replies guys,

Admittedly I only made efforts to make sure some of the fruit was sterile. I mashed the mango, papaya and passion-fruit with a small amount of boiling water in each, but did not do anything to the pineapple. I did a bit of research to see what the best way of sterilising fruit would be, and found a lot of people warning against boiling the fruit directly for fear of releasing pectin. Could just slightly covering the fruit with a small volume of boiling water like I did caused enough pectin release to change the beer?

I was worried about using a sanitiser on the fruit and then putting it into my fermenter just in case it damaged the yeast? Is this possible? Could I have just used a no-rinse sanitiser on the fruit and thrown it straight in?

Thanks again for the replies guys.
 
I agree with Simon that you've probably used too much fruit and left yourself with a very acidic tasting beer, especially bad as I assume there's loads of hop bitterness going on also.

You could try adding a bit of sugar to your beer in the glass when drinking it. Maybe dissolve some in a bit of water in the glass and pour the beer over it.

I would always boil fruit in water before adding to the FV to kill off any bugs that may be lurking. It's even better if the fruit has been previously frozen as it will go mushy and will mix better with the beer.

If you're worried about haze from pectins, you can add pectolase to break it down.
 
After seeing some reviews about a new style of IPAs, smoothie IPAs, I thought i'd try a 12l batch next week.
Here's my thoughts, as gleaned from reading various posts elsewhere and looking at good old YouTube :

My brew will be a citra and Raspberry smoothie IPA, for 12lts i'm planning to use 900g of frozen raspberries added to the fermenter after 4 days and left in there until bottling, about 10 days later. I'm going to put them in a muslin bag to keep the bits out of the brew and i'm going to dry hop with 4-5 days left. Fruit will be defrosted first before adding.

I think where you may have gone wrong was boiling the fruit first and as others have said, adding just too much fruit.

Oh, and i'm also planning to add some lactose to give it the smoothie mouth feel, be interesting to see if it actually tastes good or not, fingers crossed. :thumb:

Stroll.
 
After seeing some reviews about a new style of IPAs, smoothie IPAs, I thought i'd try a 12l batch next week.
Here's my thoughts, as gleaned from reading various posts elsewhere and looking at good old YouTube :

My brew will be a citra and Raspberry smoothie IPA, for 12lts i'm planning to use 900g of frozen raspberries added to the fermenter after 4 days and left in there until bottling, about 10 days later. I'm going to put them in a muslin bag to keep the bits out of the brew and i'm going to dry hop with 4-5 days left. Fruit will be defrosted first before adding.

I think where you may have gone wrong was boiling the fruit first and as others have said, adding just too much fruit.

Oh, and i'm also planning to add some lactose to give it the smoothie mouth feel, be interesting to see if it actually tastes good or not, fingers crossed. :thumb:

Stroll.
900gram for 12 litres is an overkill and do yourself a favour throw them in in a muslin bag frozen not defrosted,supermarket frozen fruit is sterile packed anyway and no fear of infection
 
900gram for 12 litres is an overkill and do yourself a favour throw them in in a muslin bag frozen not defrosted,supermarket frozen fruit is sterile packed anyway and no fear of infection


The very successful brew I saw on YouTube used 2.1kg of raspberries for 23lts so that's how I decided to use 900g for 12lts, I actually scaled it down a little as I was slightly worried about overkill and I also worried about putting that amount of frozen fruit into the wort, didn't know what effect that would have on the overall temperature.

It's all just a learning curve I suppose, certainly an exciting one though :)
 
After seeing some reviews about a new style of IPAs, smoothie IPAs, I thought i'd try a 12l batch next week.
Here's my thoughts, as gleaned from reading various posts elsewhere and looking at good old YouTube :

My brew will be a citra and Raspberry smoothie IPA, for 12lts i'm planning to use 900g of frozen raspberries added to the fermenter after 4 days and left in there until bottling, about 10 days later. I'm going to put them in a muslin bag to keep the bits out of the brew and i'm going to dry hop with 4-5 days left. Fruit will be defrosted first before adding.

I think where you may have gone wrong was boiling the fruit first and as others have said, adding just too much fruit.

Oh, and i'm also planning to add some lactose to give it the smoothie mouth feel, be interesting to see if it actually tastes good or not, fingers crossed. :thumb:

Stroll.

Why bother to keep the bits out if you're going for the smoothie effect?
 
The very successful brew I saw on YouTube used 2.1kg of raspberries for 23lts so that's how I decided to use 900g for 12lts, I actually scaled it down a little as I was slightly worried about overkill and I also worried about putting that amount of frozen fruit into the wort, didn't know what effect that would have on the overall temperature.

It's all just a learning curve I suppose, certainly an exciting one though :)

I would worry that the beer would turn out really sour with that much raspberry but as you're adding lactose that should balance it out.

Will you be using oats at all?
 
I would worry that the beer would turn out really sour with that much raspberry but as you're adding lactose that should balance it out.

Will you be using oats at all?

The beer that was brewed on YouTube proved a real hit with everyone who reviewed it so the lactose obviously alleviates the sour taste.

I want a smoothie kind of taste but I don't want pips and bits of skin in the final beer, hence the bag.

Yes, using whole rolled oats for the 1st time........
 
The beer that was brewed on YouTube proved a real hit with everyone who reviewed it so the lactose obviously alleviates the sour taste.

I want a smoothie kind of taste but I don't want pips and bits of skin in the final beer, hence the bag.

Yes, using whole rolled oats for the 1st time........

Nice. That sounds awesome!
 
Thanks again for all the replies,

I'll be sure to keep all this in mind next time I'm thinking about putting fruit in a brew.

Cheers guys
 
The beer that was brewed on YouTube proved a real hit with everyone who reviewed it so the lactose obviously alleviates the sour taste.

I want a smoothie kind of taste but I don't want pips and bits of skin in the final beer, hence the bag.

Yes, using whole rolled oats for the 1st time........

Adam at baldy's citra and raspberry citra smoothie by any chance....it's on the to brew list... ;-)
 
Galaxy hops give a passion fruit and fruit salad addition to a beer so just add more of those. mango, grapefruit, tangerine and others are all easily added with hops, so maybe consider that route. Galaxy & Amarillo combined hits the spot for me.
 
Adam at baldy's citra and raspberry citra smoothie by any chance....it's on the to brew list... ;-)

Yep, that's the one.....he seems very generous as well and sends loads of bottles out for others to review, everyone raves about it, that's what tempted me to try something different, i'll be happy if mine tastes anything like his, fingers crossed. :cheers:
 

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