Monday August 30, 2010 posted by: BeerNard in Recipe Creation

I'm liking the idea more and more of using homegrown ingredients in my beers. Since I failed to find a good way to use linknlogs oats and had to settle for quaker's instant oatmeal in my last recipe, I thought I'd give it another shot, this time with blueberries from my buddy svossler. I think a blueberry stout sounds like a spectacular idea. We're going to brew it on 9/11 this year, so Scott suggested Patriot Stout, and we're gonna make a ton of it (15 gallons), so it better be good.

There's a few different ways I see people using blueberries in beer, from mashing the berries and steeping them before the boil to adding whole berries, or just berry juice to the secondary fermenter. I'm hoping for a little more than a hint of blueberry flavor, but not too much where it becomes like a half wine, half beer mixture that's just too strange to enjoy. Because it's a stout I think it will take more to give it some kick than your typical fruity beer, like a wheat or a lighter ale.

From searching around the web, it seems like an average amount is a little less than a pound of berries per gallon to get a subtle, but not too subtle taste. They're usually added during fermentation, sometimes crushed and sometimes not. The people that seem to have had the best luck and have been most satisfied with the flavor have mashed the berries. It makes sense that to get most of the juice out the skins at least need to be broken, so I think that might be the way to go.

Also, being that this is going to be a pretty large batch, it might help to do the blueberry addition in two stages. I can picture that the bigger the pile of blueberries on the bottom, the more likely that there is "unreacted" blueberries in the center.

So there's the plan, wish me luck.