Strawberry Blonde Ale - Homebrew Recipe and Results
Fruited beers can be tricky. That’s typically one reason why we avoid brewing them. But as the strawberries come to ripeness in spring here in Texas, we could not avoid them any longer. Inspired by a few fruited seasonal beers from local breweries, we decided to try our own Strawberry Blonde Ale. We used a similar recipe to our own Blonde Ale and added some fresh strawberries to see what we might get. But first…
How to Get Fruit Flavor into Beer
Well, that’s where things can be difficult. The easiest route is to buy an extract and add it to the boil. The problem there is that most extracts taste like cough medicine, which is precisely how I don’t want my beer to taste. Another method is to add the fruit during secondary fermentation, or into the bottling or kegging process. This seemed like it might get a little messy, or pose a challenge when adding our priming sugar. I think this method would be fine if you pump your beer right into a keg, but we prime our beers, so we didn’t add the strawberry here to avoid exploding any beers with the added sugars in the strawberry during natural carbonation.
So, the method we went for was to add the strawberries to the primary fermenter similar to how a brewer might dry-hop a beer. Make sure to puree and pasteurize your strawberries first by hulling and dicing them, adding them to the freezer for about twenty-four hours to extract the sugars, then adding them to a pan with ¼ cup of water and heating them to 170-180℉ for ten minutes. This pasteurizes them, and makes it easier to smash them into a puree. Then add the strawberry puree into the beer around 7 days into fermentation. If you add it too early, the yeast will go nuts for the sugar, and you’ll have a mess on your hands and no strawberry flavor in the beer… trust us. Keep reading to see the quantity of strawberries we used in our Strawberry Blonde Ale.
Recipe
Malt
2-row - 30.4 oz (95% of mash)
Caramel 15L - 1.6 oz (5% of mash)
A blonde ale shines in its simplicity. We mashed our malt at 150℉ for one hour then sparged with one gallon of 170℉ water. We collected that sweet, sweet wort and moved onto the one-hour boil. Time for some hops!
For the boil we used Cascade hops with 9.4% alpha acid. We used Cascade with the hope that its floral and citrus character would balance nicely with the sweet strawberry and would also add a slight bitterness. Onto the boil!
Boil
Cascade - 0.2 oz at the start (60 minutes)
Irish moss clarifier (optional) - ⅕ tsp with 15 minutes remaining
We then cooled the beer and added 4 grams of preactivated (4 grams yeast in 40 ml of 95-105℉ water for 20-30 minutes) CALI yeast from CellarScience and let it ferment for two weeks to let all those delicious yeast and hop oils dance together.
Now for the strawberries.
Strawberries
Around day 7 we added 150 grams of frozen, pureed, and pasteurized strawberries. We selected 150 grams after doing a bit of research and thinking it would be the right amount for our light blonde ale. But were we correct?
At the end of our two-week fermentation, we then added 1.08 oz of corn sugar, bottled it, and waited another grueling two weeks.
Now for the fun. Here’s our first impressions of our Strawberry Blonde Ale!
Results
On the Eyes--Straw-colored, hazy, with the slightest red tint and topped with a decent cream-colored head that diminished pretty quickly. We didn’t do much in the way of filtration, so we had bits of strawberry floating around. If that bothers you feel free to take those extra filtration steps or add the strawberry flavor using one of the other methods above.
On the Nose--Malty and sweet, with just a touch of pleasant strawberry. The floral characteristics of the early addition of Cascade comes through lightly. It is mild and inviting, as a blonde ale should be. So far so good—Onto the taste!
On the Palate--The Blonde Ale shines on its own, but the slightest strawberry flavor comes through. The body is light, and the gentle bitterness from the addition of Cascade does well to balance the mild sweetness from the malt and strawberry. I thought it would be a touch sweeter, but it is pretty balanced, meaning, truly, that it is missing a bit of strawberry flavor. I quite like it, but others interested in the fruit sweetness might want to think about adding more strawberries. It is slightly dry at the finish with the added sugar from the strawberries, and overall it is a pretty good first effort at a Strawberry Blonde Ale.
Verdict
The first thing to consider when brewing a strawberry blonde ale is the strawberries. Select to brew this beer when strawberries are in season, or try to find the freshest you can at a farmer’s market. The better the strawberry, the more flavor you’ll get.
The next thing to consider is how to add the strawberries. I quite liked our method, but if you skip priming and go right to kegging, consider adding the strawberries then, and don’t forget to pasteurize them first, or you’ll end up with an infected beer, though you might find some interesting sour flavors if you don’t!
Overall, our Strawberry Blonde Ale Homebrew was good… but not great. The blonde ale itself is tried and true, but the strawberry flavor didn’t come through like we had hoped. But that is a problem simple enough to fix: add more strawberries or find fresher ones. Easy enough, and we certainly will the next time. We did have one bottle overflow on opening, so we would also consider decreasing the priming sugar just slightly to avoid that.
Anyway, try the recipe, add your own flair, and brew on.
Cheers!
Mr. Brew