Adding Fruit to Your Homebrew Using Amoretti Fruit Purees and Artisan Natural Flavorings + Recipe for Wildberry Rye Ale!
This review is by Homebrew Finds Contributor Brad Probert. Brad is an engineer, expert homebrewer and experienced reviewer. Grab a link to Brad’s website at the end of this review.
Using Amoretti Fruit Puree in Homebrew
I’ll be upfront and admit I’m not a fruit beer brewer. I do enjoy a few commercially available fruit beers, but it’s more as an occasional change of pace than something I regularly seek out or buy on a regular basis. And it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve actually brewed a fruit beer myself. A friend wanted me to make a Peach Pale Ale, and that was my first foray into brewing one. I didn’t use Amoretti products on that beer, but it’s worth a brief explanation of my experience there, in order to contrast it to my experience with the Amoretti products.
Brewing the peach beer, I didn’t have the option of fresh, delicious tasting peaches to make a beer using fresh fruit. Conceptually, this seems like the ultimate solution, but this can limit your creativity to either time of year, or quality of product substantially. My first experimental batch was using a canned puree product. Thick and “sludgy”, this gave a great mouthfeel and cloudiness, but it had a distinct “dried fruit flavor” to me. It wasn’t as bright and popping as I had wanted.
For the second batch, I did a combination of the same canned puree, but also added some natural flavoring extract I got from my LHBS. That got me more brightness and pop in the flavor, but it also came with hints of alcohol-y flavors, and somewhat artificial aroma. In the end, through working a combination of this canned puree and flavor extract, I got a beer that turned out well, but I didn’t feel either was exactly the perfect tool for fruit beer.
I saw Amoretti fruit purees and thought I’d give them a try to see if they provided a better option. Amoretti set me up with some bottles of their craft puree as well as their artisan natural flavor compounds. Both are advertised as additions to your beers, with concentration recommendations printed on the containers. The craft puree comes in a large bottle with a hand pump like a soap dispenser. Specifically designed for you to either add flavoring in bulk to your whole keg, or just a squirt into your glass before you fill it with beer. To make a sort of fruit-flavored-Radalizer.
Shop for Amoretti:
- Amoretti Artisan Natural Flavorings at Great Fermentations
- Amoretti at Label Peelers
- Search “Amoretti Puree” and “Amoretti Natural Artisan Flavor” on Amazon
- Search “Amoretti Puree” and “Amoretti Natural Artisan Flavor” on eBay
