Cherry Mama: Racked half of my DIS onto 3# of cherries today

[Kurtosis]

http://blog.kurtbrews.beer/2015/02/cherry-mama.html

 

[microbusbrewery]

Nice post and sounds like it'll be an interesting beer. However, I completely disagree with your comment in your post about frozen fruit not needing to be sanitized. While freezing can kill certain bacteria, there's quite a few (bacteria) and yeast (including wild yeast) that can survive freezing/thawing just fine. In fact, yeast cultures are often frozen for long term storage. I had a wild yeast take hold in a peach and apricot wheat beer once. I'd washed the fruit, cut it, then froze it before racking onto it in secondary. Now I always treat fruit with potassium metabisulfite and since doing so I haven't run into any issues. I'm not saying you will have an infection, but freezing is not a substitution for sanitizing.

 

[Kurtosis]

I didn't freeze it as a substitute. I bought fruit that started out frozen.

 

[microbusbrewery]

It's the same thing though...they do wash the fruit before freezing but it'll still have some wild yeast and probably bacteria on them that will wake up happy and ready to eat when thawed.

 

[Kurtosis]

In that case I will cross my fingers that the pH, established yeast population, and alcohol will keep the beasties in check )

Good to know, though. I'll pasteurize like I have in the past from now on.