Fruit - in corny keg or fermentor?

[Jzrp]

Hi all been looking for a thread that specifically answers this question but couldn’t so wanted to ask you all.

I’m doing a watermelon wheat beer (for summer if it ever comes). I have brewed the American wheat beer base and it’s in my fermzilla.

I’m getting to the point where I wish to add watermelon. The best method seems to be to get between 1-2 fresh watermelons, sanitise the outside, cut into chunks, freeze, defrost, press through a sanitised sieve to make juice and then combine.

The bit I’m torn on is whether to put the watermelon juice in the bottom of my corny keg and just rack onto it, leave keg at room temp for a week and then cold crash, or dump the juice in the fermzilla.

Is the corny keg going to have problems with the pressure if I do the ‘secondary ferm’ in the keg? Obv if it’s juice I won’t have to worry so much about fruit gunk in the keg but the pressure is a concern

 

[Jzrp]

Hi all been looking for a thread that specifically answers this question but couldn’t so wanted to ask you all.

I’m doing a watermelon wheat beer (for summer if it ever comes). I have brewed the American wheat beer base and it’s in my fermzilla.

I’m getting to the point where I wish to add watermelon. The best method seems to be to get between 1-2 fresh watermelons, sanitise the outside, cut into chunks, freeze, defrost, press through a sanitised sieve to make juice and then combine.

The bit I’m torn on is whether to put the watermelon juice in the bottom of my corny keg and just rack onto it, leave keg at room temp for a week and then cold crash, or dump the juice in the fermzilla.

Is the corny keg going to have problems with the pressure if I do the ‘secondary germ’ in the keg? Obv if it’s juice I won’t have to worry so much about fruit gunk in the keg but the pressure is a concern

Thinking about it I guess I can just stick the spunding valve etc I have on my fermzilla on the keg and let out pressure above 10 psi?

Interested to hear pros and cons from anyone who’s done similar

 

[Jordang]

If it were me I would add it to the fv, just incase it generated a load of gunk. That way you don’t have to worry about it getting into the final beer. I have a raspberry blonde to do that I will chuck raspberries onto the beer in the fv once fermented out

 

[Cheshire Cat]

I add raspberries to my secondary fermentation vessel and leave them for seven days before bottling.

 

[AJA]

For my fruit sour I was just going to dump it in the primary (corny), after fermentation finished and after harvesting the bulk of the yeast.
Any reason it is usually done in secondary?

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Supposed off flavours from the crud. I’ve always done it in 2FV so wouldn’t know but haven’t risked it.

 

[Jzrp]

Thanks for replies all.

I stopped bothering with a secondary vessel once I got the fermzilla pressure set up purely because didn’t want to buy (or have room for) two of them and had read people arguing secondary not really necessary.

That said I rarely do fruit beer so it’s a slight conundrum. I like the thought of getting all the fruit juice in the keg and none wasted but at same time might be cleaner to do in the fermzilla.

 

[Jzrp]

Slight tangent but has anyone worked out an optimal way to determine how much of the fruit has fermented out/ how long to leave it for various different results?

What I really mean is sometimes a beer with fruit in is almost unrecogniseable if all or almost all the fruit has fermented out, and sometimes you might want that… other times you might want to ferment say 50-75% of the fruit to leave a bit of the fruit flavour and sweetness on the end of the beer?

 

[Hazelwood Brewery]

Quite a lot of fruit doesn’t add the flavour you hope, raspberries are one exception. Normally you ferment your base beer and then transfer the beer to a secondary fermenter to get the beer off the yeast/trub and add the fruit to secondary. Leave it for a week to ferment out the fruit sugars.

You can also add more intense fruit flavours to beers and ciders by adding cordials, you can even add these to the glass at dispense and offer a range of flavours from a single base beer.

 

[Manxnorton]

i'm going to put philly sour in the fermzilla, rack into 2ndry.
Clean the fermzilla and back into with fruit.
Under co2 pressure & close transfer to get using inline filter.
Many ways to do it.
bri