My Husband’s Fruit Hefeweizen

My husband decided to brew on Thanksgiving weekend a hefeweizen, which is a style of wheat beer. Due to having to cook all the grains, hops, and malts in water to make a “tea”, as I like to call it, beer is seldom made in batches smaller than 5 gallons. The reasoning is why go though all that work for one gallon when it takes just about the same amount of time to do 5 gallons.

My husband got the idea to split the hefeweizen out into five single gallon containers and flavor each with some fruit extract he bought from the supply store before bottling. These extracts are a bit runny and come in a 4 oz bottle that is meant to be put into 5 gallons of water, so he added one ounce per gallon. So now he has plain, cherry, mango, and raspberry hefeweizens.

For the fifth batch, because he likes pomegranates so much, we bought some pomegranate juice to put in it. However, he set that one aside for a week to ferment in case the yeast wanted to eat on the pomegranate sugars. In theory, the yeast could eat the syrups placed in the other bottles, but being a novice at brewing beer, he didn’t know how to solve the problem, and just did it hoping it would explode.

Well, these beers didn’t turn out quite as well as he had hoped, and has since been told that using Oregon Fruit Puree is superior to using the fruit extracts he bought from the home brewing supply store. I still think it was quite cleaver of him to split a batch like that, and I may try something like that with mead and fruit flavors in the future.