Cherry juice in the secondary

[The Boss]

I acquired one gallon of frozen, unpasturized pure cherry JUICE from a local farm in Rockford, MI., and I want to make a cherry stout and a cherry wheat. However, I am having trouble finding information on brewing with this form of fruit. Ray Daniels gives full accounts for puree and frozen, that being between 1 - 2lbs of fruit per gallon or beer, but how does that translate to my juice?
My concern here is in volumes, how many pounds of cherrys are in a gallon of cherry juice? Also, when one adds puree or whole fruit in the secondary, the 'fruit', or what is left of it, stays in the carboy. With the juice, its all in the beer! Does this then require lower volumes of juice than my guess of 12 oz per gallon of beer? Considering the differences between whole and juice, will the juice lighten the color of my beer (stout to a brown)?

[ray m]

I'll try to help ya here, Boss. I recently brewed a cherry ale using 6 lbs. of dark, sweet cherries in a light ale base. The cherries added a bit of an amber hue, but did nothing for the flavor except take some hoppiness out of the beer & smoothed it out a lot.

I've also used 4 oz. of cherry flavoring extract with no impact on color, but it added a noticable cherry note to the flavor. So, if I were you (looks like you'll probably just have to toy around with this juice), I would go with doing the cherry wheat first, and I would try starting with 1 quart for 5 gallons. It'll add some color, for sure, and as for the flavor, well, I dunno. It's better to use too little at first than too much, but I think you'll get a decent cherry flavor. I would also add this juice to the 2ndary fermenter, and pasteurize the juice first by heating it to @ 160* and holding for 20 minutes or so. I wouldn't add any more juice at bottling time (if you did not get the degree of flavor you wanted) because you run a big risk of bottle bombs. If you did not get enough flavor (or too much) then make another batch & change the amount of cherry juice you think you'll need.

Same for the stout. If you want a noticable flavor here, you'll need more juice than what you'll need in the wheat because the cherry flavor must compete with the roastiness of the dark grains. I don't think the juice will lighten the color much, but it may give it an attractive deep red hue.

This is the best I can do---hope it helps!

:)

[BeerBelly]

If the first quart is not enough, is it possible to add more juice to the secondary. After a few days in the secondary taste, test it and add more, let it ferment more? There is still plenty of yeast held in suspension, right?

Just a thought.

BB

[ray m]

I would say, beerbelly, that that would be a wise approach!