Adding fruit through carboy neck?

Last night I added 6lb of frozen berry medley(blueberry, rasberry, and blackberry) to an american wheat beer through the neck of my 6.5 gal carboy. I had a REALLY hard time doing this. My funnel was too small and for some reason I never thought about how I would add the fruit until I was trying to smash 6lb of fruit down the neck like an idiot.

Luckily I put the funnel aside and had my friend poor fruit through my sanitized hands coupled around the carboy neck like a funnel with a bigger hole. It seemed to work well except for the occasional huge raspberry that would get stuck in the neck every once in a while which I would mash down if necessary.

The only thing I can think of right now to make adding fruit easier is either use a bucket or better bottle since they both have a wider opening then a glass carboy.

My question is this. What different techniques do you all employ In order to easily and quickly add frozen fruit down the skinny neck of a glass carboy? I've seen pictures of carboys with what looks like peaches cut in quarters. How do people even do that?

I use a large food grade funnel -- the largest that will fit into the carboy, and cut the narrowest end of the funnel off to make a wider exit. but I also mash half of the fruit until it is almost juice and leave the other half just loosely crushed. I fill the funnel with the berry and mash mix and still with the wide opening, I need to push it through when a few berries block the way. I use a sanitized brew spoon, but use the long handle of it to push through the funnel. It is much faster and cleaner than trying to get berries through a standard funnel into the carboy. I allow my beer to finish before adding fruit. Recently racked an American lager onto 10lbs of crushed blueberry and the fermentation has been restarted and steady bubbling for 8 days... If you take gravity readings throughout each step there is a formula for properly calculating abv. just do a search for fruit and abv calculating and you will find it.

Cheers!

I made a berry cider and added 4 lbs of berry mix. I bought the stuff in the morning and left it in the fridge. It thawed for the day and the mushy stuff got stuffed through the funnel. Messy but it worked.

I have a really big funnel with about as wide a neck as will fit in a carboy. If that's too narrow, like when I was adding prunes to a cider, I jam them through with a wine thief or a siphon plunger.

Thanks everybody. It seems like the general consensus is smashing the fruit with a sanitized tool through a funnel with an opening wide enough that can fit into the carboy. Sounds a whole lot better then what I did:smack:

Brewery around here makes a beautiful "blonde ambition" its a pilsner/wheat base with apriocts added.

When i did a clone of this beer i ended up buying 3# canned apricots, drained and washed then pureed with some honey and Immersion blender, heated till it started to bubble then let cool and added to secondary.

IMO. yes it might cause more pectin haze from heating but an Immersion blender really gets the job done.

If you think that was hard, wait until you try to pull that stuff out

Some stuff will swell up and it is a pain in the ass to get out of a carboy as it won't pass through the carboy's neck without some annoying attempts at slicing/breaking it apart with things not originally meant for brewing that you end up hunting around the house to try to deal with it. Like wire hangers for example

On the other hand other things will simply turn into mush and slide right out. Not a great thing either, as this tends to make it hard to rack off and leaving it all behind.

Either way, good luck with that!

Having said that..

In the future, if you plan on adding anything of the type post primary, I recommend you perform secondary in a bucket along with it's cover fitted with an airlock. It's what I do. MUCH easier. Not to mention that you can add your additions in a muslin bag or similar which makes it that much easier to pull out of secondary or clean up after racking off it.

But be careful, depending on what you put in the muslin, it will can disintegrate and if you try to pull the bag out of the beer it'll just let a ton of gunk through the fibers and you'll have a cloudy mess of a beer to rack/filter.

In other words, if you don't know how it'll behave when you pull that bag out, it's always better and safer to rack off of it from the bucket first.

Happy brewing! :rockin:

I pureed 10# of frozen peaches. That helped it get it in and extract tons of flavor and aroma. Racking was a royal PITA even after crash cooling as not all of it dropped out. Large fruit makes it easier to rack but takes much longer to get the flavor and aroma, and getting it in a carboy.