Base Imperial Stout and Hopping for adding Cherries

[Zephyr259]

My wife has requested a cherry imperial stout, I've been wanting to brew a big stout for a while anyway. Most of these have a big bitterness to balance out the alcohol but I think that might clash with the fruit. I'm not really wanting to go all in on the "pastry stout" idea so don't want something way too sweet.

Currently my only roast malts are Crisp chocolate malt (950 ebc) and Fawcett's roasted rye (500 ebc). I've made my own tweak to the Black is Beautiful stout or there are the Greg Hughes RIS and Vanilla Bourbon Stout, I've brewed the latter and it only wants chocolate malt which is handy.

Hops wise I'm thinking I should be lower so they don't clash with the cherries, GH's RIS is quite standard at 60 IBU and the VBS is down at 30 which might be good enough, it's not a sweet beer. Considering going for a big stout so 1.090 to 1.100 probably then the cherries afterwards as a puree, which seems the least hassle as I recall fruit being a pain from my winemaking days.

Any thoughts? In my due diligence of searching the forum I saw that @Dads_Ale made something similar a few years back (even used Funkin puree) but just found a comment in a thread on flavouring an imperial stout.

Thanks

 

[Pennine]

I was thinking about this as well, I think pasteurized cherry puree might be the best way to go. This will limit all the other fun stuff that might come along with whole frozen cherries. IBU's seem ok at 60 with this heavy of a stout, it will be malt heavy anyway.

Also a consideration, toasted coconut might give it a nice balance that vanilla will not do alone.

 

[Zephyr259]

Toasted coconut could be good, vanilla was a bit pointless in the VBS, I used extract and it faded really quickly and could barely be detected over the bourbon anyway.

 

[strange-steve]

When I brew a style I'm not familiar with I always look at Jamil's notes in BCS. Here are some pointers from the "fruit beer" section:

Start with a tried and tested, quality base beer.

Generally, lowering the bittering by 10 to 20 percent from the base beer will allow just the right amount of sweetness to come through.

The more sour the fruit, the lower the bitterness should be.

The only hop addition for fruit beers should be bittering, ie no late hops.

Remember that the sweetness from the fruit will ferment out leaving behind any sourness, and balance this with malt sweetness.

Canned fruit puree is the preferred option.

A good starting point is ~1.2kg of puree per 20L, but a mild fruit in a dark beer may need double this.

Add the puree directly to the fermenter (or secondary) towards the end of fermentation.

Not sure if any of this is helpful, but might give you some pointers.

 

[Zephyr259]

Thank Steve that's all really helpful. Jamil is one author that I've never had much exposure to, listened to some of his podcasts a couple of years ago. BCS is also one of the go-to books which I don't have.

That sounds like good advice on the bitterness and is kinda what I was looking for, so with sour cherries I'd be dropping 60 IBU down to around 48 or so and I wondered if late hops would clash, not that they'd be missed in an RIS.

I was going to use a 1 kg pouch of puree, and was thinking of making a 10 L batch, so could be quite strong but in a big stout it should carry the cherry flavour ok, and that's the timing I was thinking too.

If anyone has used puree before, does it leave a heap of sludge in the FV? I normally bottle from primary on my small batches but a litre of puree may prevent that and then I'd be better scaling up to 15L and using the conical which will let me dump trub.