How to Add Fruit and Spice to Your Homebrew

A kit brew done properly is a good beer, and there comes a point where you've made the same good beer four times and you start wondering what would happen if you put something else in it. Fruit and spice are the easiest way to find out, because they need no extra gear, they cost very little, and the worst case is a batch you drink yourself instead of handing around.

Here's what actually goes in, when it goes in, and how much is too much.

Fruit, and which form to use

Fruit brings sweetness and tartness, and a fair bit of colour with it, and the form you use changes how much work it is more than it changes the result.

• Fresh fruit. This gives you the best flavour if you've got a tree or a good box of it. Wash it, chop or crush it, and remember you're adding whatever is living on the skin, so it has to go in where the alcohol can look after it.
• Frozen fruit. My preference for most batches. Freezing ruptures the cell walls, so the juice comes out more readily than it does from fresh, and it's already washed and diced.
• Juice and concentrate. This is the reliable one, and it's what I'd use if I wanted the same result twice. Check the label for preservatives, because potassium sorbate is there to stop things fermenting and it will do exactly that to your yeast.

Berries and citrus give you the most for the least effort, and stone fruit sits just behind them. Raspberry and blackberry go into a pale ale or a wheat beer, cherry and apricot suit something darker, and orange or lime peel in a wheat beer is about as reliable as brewing gets.

Spice, and going lighter than you think

The spice rack is the cheapest experiment in brewing, and the one where people most often overdo it. A few that earn their place:

• Cinnamon. Use a single stick in a dark ale rather than the ground stuff, because ground cinnamon turns into sludge and never fully settles out.
• Fresh ginger. Grate it into a lighter beer or a cider and it wakes the whole thing up.
• Vanilla. A split bean in a stout is one of the genuinely great combinations and it's forgiving about quantity.
• Coriander seed. Crack it and put it in a wheat beer, and you get that faintly perfumed thing a Belgian wheat does.
• Chilli. Drop one dried chilli into a stout, taste it every couple of days, and pull it out the moment you notice it.

Herbs are worth a go as well. Mint in a light ale sounds daft and works, and rosemary in an amber is the kind of thing you'll either love or pour on the garden.

When to put it in

Timing matters as much as the ingredient, because heat and fermentation both strip out the delicate aromas you were chasing.

In the boil. Hard spices like cinnamon sticks, ginger root and coriander seed can go in here, and the flavour integrates deeply. Go light, because heat pulls the oils out fast and there's no taking it back.

In the fermenter, once the vigorous stage has calmed down. This is where fruit belongs. Add it too early and the yeast tears through the sugars while everything is still frothing, and the aroma goes out the airlock with the carbon dioxide instead of staying in the beer.

At secondary or at bottling. This is the gentlest option of the three. A vanilla bean or a light fruit addition here keeps the fresh, bright character intact, and you get a much cleaner result.

The three rules that save a batch

• Sanitise anything that touches the beer. Fruit included. Either freeze it first, heat it gently without letting it boil, or add it late enough that the alcohol is doing the work for you. Boiling fruit sets the pectin and gives you a permanent haze.
• Start smaller than feels right. You can add more next batch. You can't take cinnamon back out.
• Write it down. The quantity, the timing, the form of the fruit, and what you thought of it at three weeks and at three months. Future you will want that page, and future you will not remember.

The shortcut, if you want the flavour and not the mess

Fruit in a fermenter is fiddly, and some nights you'd rather just brew something. A fruit cider kit does the same job with none of the straining, and it's a fair way to work out which flavours you actually like before you commit a whole batch of beer to the experiment.

Shop related products

• Thomas Coopers Bootmaker Pale Ale 1.7kg. A clean base that takes berries and citrus without a fight.
• Coopers Original Stout 1.7kg. The one to put a vanilla bean or a chilli into.
• Coopers Light Malt Extract 1.5kg. For building a bit more body underneath a fruit addition so the beer doesn't go thin.
• US-05 Safale Ale Yeast 11.5g. A neutral ale yeast, which is what you want when the flavour is meant to come from the fruit.

Did you know we also stock the Mangrove Jack's craft cider range in store, including apple, pear, mixed berry, raspberry and lime, and blueberry, along with the Morgan's ginger beer kit, Gladfield medium crystal malted grain, finishing hops and no rinse sanitiser. None of that is on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf.

The fruit and the spices are your own, out of the kitchen or off the tree. What we can sort out is everything underneath them, in the homebrew range and beer supplies, and if you want a second opinion on a combination before you commit a batch to it, Brewhilder is our homebrew adviser and she'll give you a straight answer.

Have a read of these next

• How to experiment with new beer flavours using additives and extracts
• How to perfect the balance of flavour in your homebrew beer
• How to host a homebrew tasting party worth turning up to

Cheers,
Candeece

My spice rack gets raided for the fermenter more often than it does for dinner, and I'm not the least bit sorry about it.