Racking Off of Peaches (and Other Pesky Fruits)

[rlonardo]

So, 7 weeks ago I brewed my first Berliner Weisse. 4 weeks ago I split the batch - half went onto peaches, half went alone.

Today I bottled both batches. The berliner by itself had no issues (I'm new, but I'm not that new!). The peach batch on the other hand had just about everything go wrong.

First, my auto siphon clogged racking into the bottling bucket. This caused about 1/2 - 3/4 gallon to be left behind. Whatevs.

Then as I went to bottle the first bottle, the bottling wand clogged almost immediately. I disassembled, cleared the clog, tried again. Same thing almost immediately. Not knowing what else to do, I ended up POURING the beer into each bottle. Ugh.

So I have 2 questions:

1. How long does it take a beer to oxidize? It will obviously be an issue with the peach version, so I'm thinking I will have to drink it as quickly as possible...

2. How do you strain out the peaches or other fruits which could gunk things up? I'm thinking next time I will wrap a hop bag around the base of my auto siphon to filter things out. Will this work? Would it choke the flow?

Both beers taste delicious. The peach one is significantly more sour and has just the right amount of peach flavor. I definitely would like to brew this again, so I'd really like to avoid these problems in the future!!!!

Thanks!!!

 

[billl]

1. Happens very fast if you've got a bunch of O2. On the plus side, the yeast will consume some/most of that as they chew up the priming sugar. Also, you've got some powerful flavors in that beer that will hide many flaws.

2. Any fine mesh screen should work. Of course, if you are sucking up a cloudy mess, anything will clog eventually. If you have a way to cold crash, that will go a long way towards dropping any floaties to the bottom.

 

[RonPopeil]

Cold crash and then siphon to keg through a paint strainer.