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A Couple of Fruit Beer Questions
So I'm in the process of making my first fruit beer, its a honey raspberry wheat. I racked onto 3lbs raspberries yesterday and its already got a nice reddish tint to it. How long should I leave the beer on top of the fruit? I'm thinking a week or two? Also, I've read that when bottling a fruit beer you don't add as much priming sugar because that can lead to bottle bombs and gushers. Not sure if I'm missing something, but wouldn't you just wait until the fermenting completely finished after you added the fruit?
I think 2-3 weeks would be fine for exposure to fruit.
Many people use different techniques to get the fruit to leach its goodness into the beer. By doing so this releases much of the fruit sugar into the beer. These techniques usually include mashing berries up, running them through a food processor, slicing fruit up, macserating with sugar, freezing and thawing the fruit, even microwaving the fruit. The best fruit beers I have ever made was done using a food processor to make a "relish" out of the fruit.
Released sugars will get fermented off while in the secondary fermentor. (Go figure, actually fermenting in seconday fermentor). So if you leave the beer on the fruit for a couple weeks that sugar shouldn't increase your risk of bottle bombs.
I would just prime as normal. In some cases your beer could benefit from a trinary fermentation, just to let some fruit bits drop out prior to bottling.
I just blogged about this topic here.
Thanks brewchez. I used frozen fruit and let it thaw then I just kind of mashed up not leaving too many whole berries in tact. Next time I plan on using the Oregon fruit puree to see how that works out.
I'm getting ready to do an 5gal batch of Apricot Wheat/Weizen. Lite to the weizen. Looking at what's available around here, thinking about using 6# of 
Apricot preserves. Looking at the lable, "No Preservitives Added", apricots, apricot puree concentrate, corn sugar, sugar, pectin, citrus acid.
So, maybe a 4-1/2 gal., lower ABV primary, get OG, ferment for a week, then check SG & to-
Secondary- put the preserves in 2 qts boiling water, w/ pectic enzyme, to dissolve, cool, into secondary, rack on top - get new SG
ferment another week or so, then rack to tertiary, let 'er sit for a couple weeks & bottle.
If this works, could so the same with raspberry or strawberry.
Your thoughts, ladies & gentlemen.
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