FRUITS & FLAVORINGS
Enter any craft brewery in the country, and there’s a good chance that the tap tap list will look like the menu at a smoothie bar. Fruits from pineapple to passionfruit, sweet and tangy fruits are now commonly being used in beers.
While heavily fruited styles have become more popular of late, the practice of adding fruit to beer does have historical precedent. Brews like Framboise and Kriek have long been staples of the Belgian scene, and flavoring beer with various fruits dates back to at least ancient Egypt.
Most brewers tend to use cherry, raspberry, and apricot for brewing because these fruits are most practical to work with. They have a low water concentration, while the flavor concentration is high, so not many of them are needed to get desired taste.
Brewers have created plenty of unusual offerings, experimenting with fruits including elderberry, dragon fruit, and prickly pear — a fruit harvested from a cactus that some describe as a cross between raspberry and watermelon.
Fruit or flavorings can be added at many different stages of brewing and can be in many different forms. From fresh to frozen from preserves to flavor extracts; breweries use many different forms of fruit to get the right flavor into their beer.
According to the BJCP (Beer Judge Certification Program) style guidelines.
The Fruit Beer category is for beer made with any fruit or combination of fruit under the definitions of this category. The culinary, not botanical, definition of fruit is used here – fleshy, seed-associated structures of plants that are sweet or sour, and edible in the raw state. Examples include pome fruit (apple, pear, quince), stone fruit (cherry, plum, peach, apricot, mango, etc.), berries (any fruit with the word ‘berry’ in it), currants, citrus fruit, dried fruit (dates, prunes, raisins, etc.), tropical fruit (banana, pineapple, guava, papaya, etc.), figs, pomegranate, prickly pear, and so on. It does not mean spices, herbs, or vegetables, especially botanical fruit treated as culinary vegetables.
Sub categories of fruit beers have been subdivided into:
Fruit Beer: A harmonious marriage of fruit and beer, but still recognizable as a beer. The fruit character should be evident but in balance with the beer, not so forward as to suggest an artificial product
Fruit and Spice Beer; any combination of spice and fruit ingredients. The use of the word spice does not imply only spices can be used; any Spice, Herb, or Vegetable (SHV) may be used.
Specialty Fruit Beer: A Specialty Fruit Beer is a fruit beer with some additional ingredients or processes, such as fermentable sugars (honey, brown sugar, invert sugar, etc.) added.
