How I stopped worrying and learned to love the fruit!

Raspberry Porter!

For years I have been planning to brew a chocolate porter. I found a recipe in Zymurgy (July/August 2007) for a chocolate -cherry porter shortly after I started brewing, and I filed it away against the time when I could actually make it happen. It sounded great, but got lost somewhere in my pile of recipes that I had also saved against the time when I could get around to brewing them.  Oops!

Finally, last year I bought a can of raspberry puree, with the intention of making a chocolate raspberry porter--something in flavor that I imagined would be like the muffins of the same sort.  This year, I finally got to make the beer, and it turned out to be both better, and easier than I imagined.

Step 1: Brew the base beer

I had to start with a recipe, and found one on the internet that sounded interesting.  Not the Zymurgy recipe, but another porter recipe, which I adapted a bit. Here it is:

Ingredients

Amt	Name	Type	#	%/IBU
10 lbs	Pale Malt, Maris Otter (Thomas Fawcett) (3.0 SRM)	Grain	1	57.4 %
2 lbs 8.0 oz	Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)	Grain	2	14.4 %
12.0 oz	Caramel Malt - 60L (Cargill) (60.0 SRM)	Grain	3	4.3 %
9.6 oz	Melanoidin (Weyermann) (30.0 SRM)	Grain	4	3.4 %
8.0 oz	Chocolate Malt (450.0 SRM)	Grain	5	2.9 %
0.70 oz	Northern Brewer [9.70 %] - Boil 60.0 min	Hop	6	26.5 IBUs
0.50 oz	Northern Brewer [9.70 %] - Boil 30.0 min	Hop	7	9.6 IBUs
0.28 tsp	Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 mins)	Fining	8	-
1.0 pkg	SafAle English Ale (DCL/Fermentis #S-04) [23.66 ml]	Yeast	9	-
3 lbs 1.0 oz	Red Raspberry Puree (12.0 SRM)	Extract	10	17.6 %

Gravity, Alcohol Content and Color

Est Original Gravity: 1.093 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.023 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 9.3 %
Bitterness: 36.1 IBUs
Est Color: 25.5 SRM

Measured Original Gravity: 1.069 SG
Measured Final Gravity: 1.010 SG
Actual Alcohol by Vol: 7.8 %
Calories: 231.5 kcal/12oz 

Mash Steps

Name	Description	Step Temperature	Step Time
Mash In	Add 19.94 qt of water at 166.9 F	152.0 F	60 min
Mash Out	Add 10.05 qt of water at 206.2 F	168.0 F	10 min

Sparge: Fly sparge with 1.47 gal water at 168.0 F 

What I wasn't thinking about was that this was already a high gravity recipe at 1.069--high for the style, anyway.  On top of that, I was going to add Raspberry Puree that would add more gravity points on top of that  to make it even stronger.  Oh well, it would be a Raspberry imperial porter, I guess!

So I brewed, and I fermented. And it finished at about the right final gravity, 1.020.  The biggest trick was managing the temperature using a cooler and regular additions of ice to keep it under 70 degrees. The flavor and mouthfeel weren't quite what I imagined, being a bit thinner and less roasty than I anticipated.  However it was good!

Step 2:   Secondary on Raspberry! 

For almost 3 weeks, the beer sat on raspberry puree. When I finally kegged it the gravity was 1.016, so another few percent of alcohol! I put it on CO2 at about 2.6 ATM for a couple of weeks, and it carbonated nicely.

The results

The beer has a really lovely raspberry flavor and aroma, but is not particularly sweet. It is really delicious, but does not have the chocolate overtones I would have liked, nor does it taste particularly like a porter. I think next time I brew it, I will change the base to be lower in gravity and use a robust porter as the starting point so it will have more of a standard porter starting point. Mind you, this is not a bad beer, but I expect if I were to enter it in a competition as a Raspberry Porter, I would get dinged because it did not taste like a porter, although the raspberry aroma and flavor are wonderful!
This was actually not my first, but the first I did to really go with a bold fruit. Last year I co-brewed an apricot Saison with my friend Mike, and that also came out well, but apricot is such a mild flavored fruit, it was almost hidden.

Please reply with your fruit beer experiences. I would love to hear what you have done that has worked, or not!