Brewing beers with fruit additions is both fun and delicious, especially as the weather warms and we drag on into summer. But like with any brewing additive, there are many variations and schools of thought on the easiest and best ways to flavor a fruit beer.

Once you’ve chosen a fruit flavor to impart in your beer – choosing the flavor is a different argument for a different day – there are generally three different methods and times you can choose to flavor your beer: during the boil, during the conditioning, or at bottling time. I have used all three with varying results.
Adding fruit during the boil creates the strongest fruit flavors – especially if you use real, fresh or frozen berries – but also requires the most fruit. One hint I found very useful (although much messier) is rather than putting the berries in a muslin bag, add lose berries to the boil so that when you pour from the kettle into your fermenter through a funnel, you essentially create a filter of berries through which the wort has to pass, sucking out even more fruit juice and flavor.

The second option is adding fruit (usually either whole fruit or a puree like those from Oregon Fruit Products) to your secondary and aging/conditioning the beer on a bed of fruit for a few weeks. This requires less fruit volume than adding during the boil and results in a great aroma, but less fruit flavor is absorbed into the beer this way. Of course this is not necessarily a bad thing; it all depends on the presence you would like the fruit to play in your beer. Often it will be a matter of trial and error until you find your preferred method of fruiting.
Lastly, the option which is probably the easiest and most cost effective would be to add a few ounces (to taste) of fruit extract to your bucket just prior to bottling. The main downside to this method, however, is that the resulting flavors can often be very syrupy—like a Seadog Blueberry for a commercial comparison – and not taste authentic enough for most seasoned homebrewers.

Whichever method you choose (and again, I recommend playing with all three), flavoring your beer with fruit is a fun and welcome summer brewing experiment. To take this a step further, try brewing a recipe or a style which would not normally call for fruit, like a Coconut Coffee Stout; or a fruit not normally found in beer, like a Kiwi Wit, and see what happens. Good luck and happy brewing!

Simply put, Beer Wars the movie (2009) is one every fan of beer needs to see. The film, which can be downloaded directly from BeerWarsMovie.com, or streamed live (or rented) from NetFlix, was written and narrated by industry insider Anat Baron. In Beer Wars, Baron tells the story of craft brewing hero Sam Calagione, the owner of Dogfish Head, and his struggles with expansion; and of Rhonda Kallman, as she tries to get her brand of malt beverage, Moonshot – a beer brewed with caffeine – off the ground as a one-woman show.

Even though Dogfish has seen unprecedented growth and success, for Calagoine, the cost and toll of expanding the brewery’s capacity weighs heavily on not only the company’s assets, but the Calagoine family’s as well. As Sam and wife Mariah struggle with putting their home up to guarantee the loans necessary to purchase larger fermentation tanks for the brewery.

The filmmaker also follows Kallman around Boston, as she tries to convince new accounts to pick up her Moonshot drink. Kallman left a position on top of the beer world as Jim Koch’s (Sam Adams) right-hand-lady to self-fund Moonshot and bootstrap the company from the ground up. Despite a slow start and tough numbers – and a quickly-diminishing bank account – she chooses to push on despite all odds and ends the film considering selling the brand (or partnering with) one of the behemoth brewing companies like MillerCoors or Anheuser-Busch.

The film is not without criticisms or faults. Filmmaker Anat Baron set out to create a film which realistically represents the beer industry while claiming she herself is an industry insider. However, she only ever worked for gimmicky malt beverage company Mike’s Hard Lemonade and is actually allergic to alcohol, so she has no real intimate knowledge of beer.

Secondly, as noted, Rhonda Kallman’s product “Moonshot” is also a malt beverage (not a beer) brewed with caffeine. Many argue that while Kallman has the right to market the drink like anyone else, it has no place in a film which is meant to fight for the rights and awareness of the country’s small, struggling, artisanal craft breweries.

Despite these arguments, Beer Wars sheds a very important light on the bully-like ways that the country’s “Big Three” breweries – Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors – still control the nation’s beer landscape (one out of every two beers sold in the U.S. is an Anheuser-Busch product), creating what many consider a monopoly of the industry. Despite the laws of a three-tiered distribution system put in place to stop such monopolies after the passage of the twenty-first amendment.

Whether you are a seasoned craft beer connoisseur or a newcomer to the hobby, Beer Wars is an important film to see; chalk-full of powerful information, industry insight and feel-good stories which makes any fan of Better Beer happy to raise a glass and toast the suds we love.