Sweetening a tart fruit beer?

Question

Sweetening a tart fruit beer?

K.Niemczyk

2020年6月7日 20:29

So I'm doing a first attempt at a Blackberry Wheat beer, per a request from a co-worker. All seems to be fine and good, however before I went to bottle I tasted it and, not unexpectedly, it is a little tart. I've noticed this before when I've done Hard Ciders or other fruit beers with strong tastes like Raspberries.

I was thinking of racking to another bucket with some Splenda to try and sweeten it up (Splenda is mostly maltodextrine, to my knowledge, so it's not ferment-able), but does anyone have suggestions on how to go about do this? I'd rather not make the mistake of making it 'too' sweet. I was going to try 10 packets for 5 gallons and then rerack again as necessary. Does this sound out of line?

Topic wheat-beer sweetness fruit homebrew

Category Mac

ptfe · Accepted Answer · 2015年5月29日 15:54

Lactose. It's unfermented by standard brewing yeasts and leaves residual sweetness in the bottle/keg. And it doesn't take much to sweeten a brew.

To figure out how much you need, mix lactose 1-to-1 by volume with boiling water and siphon off about 4 oz of your beer, then add the sweetener by the mL until it's the sweetness you want. Multiply to your volume, and decrease by about 10% to make sure you don't oversweeten as the fruit flavors and scents diminish.

For reference it took me 4 oz of lactose to sweeten about 4.5 gallons of blueberry wheat. The result was just the faintest hint of sweet.

Pepi · Accepted Answer · 2015年5月29日 06:08

I'd say it's out of line to use artificial sweeteners. Although some people brew to save money, or because beer simply isn't available where they live, most do it to make a quality product free of space-age-technology-ingredients.

Most of the sweetening of Splenda is from sucralose. Despite the company's claims that the chlorine in sucralose is natural they fail to point out that nearly all the natural chlorine in the world is chloride, found in the ocean, etc. You can draw you own conclusions.

There is a small brew pub near me that seems to use artificial sweeteners, and although it's hard to find any classic faults in the beer, it just doesn't taste right. In fact, it's pretty awful, very fake.

My suggestion is, serve it like berliner weisse, with syrup.

Sweetening a tart fruit beer?

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