Blackberry Blonde

You’ve heard me say it before on this blog: the best laid plans and all that…

We’d got it all worked out – our latest highly experimental brew was to be a Lilac Blonde ale – genuinely, as the name suggests, a blonde ale flavoured with lilac petals. You can make lilac wine; you can make elderflower blonde ale, so why not lilac blonde ale?

So what went wrong? Well it was just timing really. The lilac flowers are only at their best for a week or two, and a weekend away, a load of hot weather so they never really got to full scent and my wife coming off her bike and breaking her pelvis meant that we were just never in the right place at the right time. So that brew has gone in the diary for next year.

So we needed a fall-back plan because we were determined to do some sort of flavoured blonde ale. Hence the Blackberry Blonde, which we made this Monday. It’s a fairly standard continental blonde ale recipe (think Leffe) – lager malt, carapils, munich malt and a little wheat. We fermented it for two days, then added 1.5kg of pulped blackberries to the fermenter. Actually, to be honest, we used mixed bags of frozen dark fruit which we carefully separated on a tray. So in fact it was blackberries, cherries, raspberries, blackcurrants and a few strawberries. But we’re calling it Blackberry Blonde. Maybe Black Berry Blonde is a little more accurate.

As you can see in the photos below, it looks like an alarming amount of fruit in 5 gallons of beer. It fermented like crazy until today, and now it’s slowed right down. I expect it will take another week to finish off, then we’ve got an interesting problem of how to get all the fruit pulp strained from the beer when we put it into the keg…