Adding Rhubarb to Saison - Technique

[permo]

I am using up a bunch of my garden rhubarb is a saison this weekend and I am wondering exactly how I should add it to the fermentation? I already cut up a bunch and froze it but I want to be sure I don't introduce any bugs/nasties into the beer. Is freezing it good enough?

 

[14thstreet]

I think freezing is good enough. I've done it with rhubarb wine and my father has made beer with the exact method you've mentioned. As long as you have healthy and active yeast that is raring to go to work, you should quickly create the conditions - alcohol and lower pH - to limit most if not all microbial contaminant.

As an aside, I recently made a cucumber sour where I processed fresh cucumber along with some water in a blender. I froze the slurry in a water/soda bottle and inverted it at room temp to allow the juices to concentrate in a collecting vessel and leaving solids behind. Repeated that a second time on the filtrate and had a nice concentrate that I could dose at bottling/kegging. The only concern then might be how much sugar that juice has as it would affect your priming rates or affect sweetness, etc. Many ways to skin a cat but this might be my standard going forward. In any event, it did not involve heating/boiling, reduced the amount of water, and perhaps was easier to do as you avoid (cleaning) a secondary.

 

[permo]

Thank you for your reply. I run in a conical fermenter so I will likely unthaw, puree and toss it in and hope for the best. I can simply port out the sediment from my bottom release valve.

This is going to be a 16 gallon batch so I hope I don't ruin it!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I would have thought freezing is good enough for sterilisation purposes. However I wonder if the best way to add them would be not to puree them "raw" but to cook them down gently like you do for rhubarb fool - they have enough water that you only need to add a splash of water to stop them sticking.

 

[justinrphillips]

I did a Rhubarb wheat that was really good and I just froze it, thawed it and put it in secondary. It is going to be great with a Saison!

 

[monkeymath]

I did the same thing last year. I can look up the exact amounts tomorrow.

As far as process goes, I split the rhubarb in two parts, adding one part for the last 5 minutes of the boil, while freezing the other half and adding the thawed fruit after primary fermentation was complete. The reason for this was simply my lack of an idea how to best express the rhubarb's character in the finished product. Needless to say, this process did little in the way of expanding my knowledge on the matter.

Also, I think it is a misconception to assume that freezing sterilises stuff. I guess that it should reduce the number of critters, perhaps to a negligible order of magnitude, but there seems to be very little reliable and broadly applicable info on this.
However, people put fruit - frozen, heat-pasturized, or not treated at all - into beers all the time. I think that beer (that is, fully fermented wort, preferably hopped) is quite resilient and, given that some microorganisms such as brewer's yeast are still around, an environment that makes it difficult for intruding microbes to take hold.

EDIT: The day before brewday, I sliced 1.5kg of rhubarb, of which 1kg went into the freezer (and then into the fermentor during the peak of fermentation) and 500g were mixed with some sugar (which should help break up the fruit and release the juiced) and left for 24 hours. After those 24 hours, the rhubarb was pressed and the juice collected (it wasn't terribly much, as I recall) and added into the boil for the last 5 minutes. (All amounts for a 5gal batch)

I remember the rhubarb character as quite pleasant, a bit acidic (as expected), but perhaps a bit too indistinct. Overall, I did not like the beer too much, which I mostly blame on yeast choice (Mangrove Jack's "French Saison", probably the same as Lallemand's "Belle Saison") and the buckwheat I included in the grist, which had a rather "dirty" taste. However, I still think that rhubarb does well in a saison.