Raspberry Blonde

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Raspberry Blonde

Eric Harding • Aug 26, 2020

Making of a Raspberry Blonde Ale!

With the abundance of fresh fruit available in the Okanagan during the summer, I decided to craft up a Raspberry Blonde Ale. For the base beer, I went with the BierMuncher Centennial Blonde kit as it a crisp, balanced ale... perfect canvas to soak up the fresh fruit.

The brew day went as expected and the wort was finished fermenting in 6 days.

Fruit naturally has yeast and bacteria on it's skin, which is unwanted in most beers. Searching the web I came across many methods of adding the fruit. From simply adding the raspberries directly into the primary to creating a raspberry juice, pasteurizing and then adding to a secondary. I decided to go somewhere in the middle and dunk the raspberries in a pot of water at >180°F for 15s to kill off any wild yeast or bacteria. I also read that freezing the fruit first will break down the cell walls and will allow the fruit juices to escape easier when thawed.

Next was to figure out what amount of fruit to use. I wanted the beer to have a nice red tint along with a raspberry aroma and taste. Again, I came across a wide range of suggestion, from 1 to 5LBs/5 Gal. I decided to go with 2LBs/5Gal and see where that gets me. For my secondary I used a Carboy Liner Bag to make clean-up a cinch and not to stain the PET carboy with the red juice.

With the pasteurized raspberries in the secondary, it was time to rack the beer over from the primary. Immediately the beer turned a nice shade of red, can't wait to try it!

It was left for 7 days on the fruit to do it's thing. The beer started a mild feremtation of the added fruit sugars. Over the 7 days the raspberries lost their red colour and turned a ghostly white. Racking the beer to the keg I used a 3/8" ID Mesh Filter on the siphon rod to keep the fruit out of the finished beer.

The result...a great Raspberry Blonde that will disappear fast! The colour finshed a nice vibrant shade of red, giving your senses a heads-up of what to expect when you take your first sip.

The aroma was raspberry, raspberry and more raspberry. You don't get tired of smelling this beer. And for the taste... crisp and tart raspberry goodness. For me the raspberry taste was a bit on the lighter side, but others found it just the right amount. When I make this one again, I'll likely increase the raspberries slightly to 2.5LBs/5 Gal.

Adding fruit to a beer is a great way to make a beer pop. Raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and peaches are just a few fruits that would work well with this beer. Don't be afraid to give it a try, cheers!

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Cheers!

29 Apr, 2020

The Hop Dawgs website has been in desperate need of an overhaul for the past few years as feature become obsolete or broken. We've been researching the pros and cons of all the options available to us and then took the plunge last year. We initially tried the easiest route, which was updating to a newer version of our current platform. Simply export our products, load the new platform, tweak a template and then import the products back in, Easy Peasy. So we contracted out the job to someone who'd done some work on our site in the years past. We paid the contractor half the amount up front to get the ball rolling and after a few weeks they got us a rough sandbox to play in. We were really excited at this point and sent a few emails with changes and questions but those have fallen on deaf ears, leaving us back at square one. After weighing the pros and cons again, we decided to move to a whole new platform that would give us the control to make the website into what we want it to be... simple, straight-forward and support mobile devices. As we are writing this, the conversion is probably around 30% of the way there. Most of what remaining is importing all the products (man we have a lot!) and then running it through test paces to confirm it's calculating everything the way it should. We've linked the shipping to our Canada Post account to pass along our volume discount directly to you. PayPal will still be used to handle our transactions as they are secure and reliable. We hope to hear your opinion and how we can make the site fit for home brewers! We see it being an active website for the first while, hopefully getting better with every change. Cheers! Matt and Santana