Delicate Fruit: the Art of the Perfect Gose
Thanks for joining us again Fal, with the release of our summer beers and the recent launch of Tropical Haze Sour we wanted to learn a bit more about how you get fruit into a beer. Do you go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of fruit and then bring it back to the brewery?
I don’t think they’d have a shopping cart that large. Also, with raw fruit there are macro and micro biological issues that you have to be prepared for because you don’t want bacteria or bugs in your beer. Processing fruit is very time consuming and there are lots of variables, for instance, seeds and rinds have intense or off putting flavors so you don’t want those ending up in the mix. We work with professional fruit processors and use natural purees rather than whole raw fruit.
What about just using flavorings?
Never. We don’t use extracts or artificial flavors and only work with real fruit. It tastes better.
So you only use fresh fruit?
Fresh is usually better but frozen works too. When you’re trying to make a pumpkin beer in August you have to take seasonality and availability into consideration. Our vendors will often freeze the puree right after processing and that helps to stabilize the product for commercial use and eliminates a lot of problems or variables and makes it better to work with. However, there are exceptions. We wanted to make a cucumber beer and we tried half a dozen suppliers for frozen fruit and they were all terrible. Our decision was just not to make a cucumber beer. We made a pilot batch that was great but we couldn’t peel forty cases of cucumbers, so we just kept it for a seasonal run in the tasting room.
At what point is fruit introduced into the brewing process? We’re assuming it’s more complicated than tossing a few mangos into a fermentation tank.
I’d like to think there’s a little more skill involved. If you’re working with raw fruit you could add the fruit in the kettle and the heat from the boiling wort will sanitize everything, but then you get a jammy cooked flavor. If you add fruit cold during fermentation but the C02 will drive off delicate flavors. You could fruit after fermentation but then you get fruit sugar in your beer that can have serious implications. Have you read about exploding beer cans? That’s from unfermented sugar that re-ferments in the can. Kaboom. We add the fruit at the very end of fermentation, after most of the carbon dioxide is created. The yeast is in suspension to consume the sugar and the C02 is gone so it doesn’t remove the delicate flavors.
The fruit is added on the last day of fermentation so we end up with nice aromas and flavors and a stable product that we can send out to market.
Is that what most breweries do or is this some proprietary process you’ve developed?
There are 8,000 breweries in America and I have no clue what everyone else is doing. I think most breweries our size are doing fairly similar things and we’ve arrived at these decisions based on good brewing practices. I can’t imagine anyone else our size buying 1000 flats of strawberries to squish and process themselves and then put into fermenters but you never know.
Thanks again Fal for sitting down to educate us on this fascinating brewing process. We love all of the fruit beers so we’re thankful that you’re able to put your time, effort and skill into crafting these unique brews that have come to define Anderson Valley. Now if you’ll excuse us we have 1000 cases of strawberries that need smashing.
