Raspberry addition?

Just finished a bomber bottle of Lost Coast Raspberry Brown. Pretty good stuff and something I'd like to try to make as a novelty/change-up beer to have on hand. Only thing is I haven't had any experience adding fruit to beer so I'd appreciate some advice on this one.

If you've tried this particular beer do you have any ideas on building a clone? If not, I've got recipes for a couple of good browns so I'm thinking of tossing in some fresh raspberries as I move the beer to secondary fermentation. ???

I'm doing 5 gallon batches and prefer all grain recipes. Thanks!

In my experience half a can of the raspberry puree from NB is enough to give a mild flavor. I have never had the beer in question, but you can scale the profile as needed. I would imagine a brown has more malt flavor than half a can can overcome though.

I racked onto my raspberry when transferring into the secondary and layered it for a while, but you can use the same process for an ale. The warmer temperatures may add some interesting profile notes.

I say go for it.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

You'll have to experiment with a few batches to dial in your raspberry additions into the secondary. Absolutely freeze the raspberries and/or soak them in idophor or star san to sanitize them before putting them in the secondary. Consider this a good "washing" step.

I do know a quick and dirty way to create a good raspberry beer, but it would involve using an all natural raspberry extract. Four ounces of extract is about perfect for a 5 gallon batch of ale. Add it to your bottling bucket with your priming sugar and then bottle/keg your beer.

I prefer all natural fresh extracts like this to going with whole fruits and secondaries because of the risk for infection. The only time I don't use natural extracts is ifI can't find an exact flavor match or an extract version of the fruit i'm looking to use.

Thanks! You guys made a couple really good points on things I hadn't thought of. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that fresh fruit could introduce an infection into the beer. (duhh) Will definitely use the extract flavoring when I do this batch. And thanks for the suggestions on the amount to try at first. I would have had no idea how much to use. I do know I'll probably need to make this a couple of times to get the proportions right and will post an update in a few months when I think I have it dialed in.

In case anyone is still following this thread ....

Today I opened my first bottle of the raspberry brown ale. I used the recipe for Sparky's Brown Ale I found on this forum, bottled half the batch as straight brown ale and then added half a bottle of raspberry extract to the second 2 1/2 gallons. Bottled that up and marked it raspberry brown.

Results? Sparky's Brown is a pretty decent recipe. The beer tastes good after 3 weeks in the primary and two weeks in the bottle. I does taste young so I'm going to let it set another couple of weeks before deciding if this is going to be my "go-to" brown ale recipe.

The raspberry? Wow! Waaay too much flavoring!!! Got it down to pouring 1/3 glass of the raspberry ale and then filling the glass with straight brown ale. At least at that ratio the rasperry flavoring doesn't make your nose run.

If I try this again I'm going with 1/3 bottle of extract in a full 5 gallon batch of beer (or the equivalent if I split the next batch too).