Blueberry Beer and Rhubarb Beer

After homebrewing for a couple of years now, the husband and I decided to get adventurous.  We had made a delicious German Hefe a couple summers ago and this time we decided to make an American Hefeweizen with fruit flavors.  While living in Boston, one of my favorite beers was Seadog Bluberry and the Bunker Hill Blueberry beer at Beerworks.  Naturally, we would do a blueberry beer.  We didn't want to use extract because often the extract adds an artificial flavor and we wanted a more pure fruit taste.  We decided to use frozen blueberries to reduce the cost of fresh fruit and, in addition, freezing fruit breaks down the cellular structure of the fruit allowing more flavor to be extracted.  For each gallon it's suggested to use one pound of fruit.  As we pondered over the other type of fruit to use, we remembered what we had right in our freezer.  My husband's family grows a lot of rhubarb from a rhubarb plant that had come from Sweden, brought to North Dakota by his great great grandmother and transported to California.  This plant produces so much rhubarb that when we go home to Northern California we often bring back with us bags and bags of the fruit to later make a crisp, pie, or compote.

We had never had a rhubarb beer (or heard of one), let alone use fruit in our beer making.  As it turns out, it's quite easy.  We made a 5 gallon batch of American hefeweizen beer and after the first fermentation, split the batch and added frozen blueberries to one fermentor and cut up frozen rhubarb to the other.  Because the blueberries had so much natural sugar, the beer continued to ferment in the secondary and we had to attach a "blow-off" tube.  After the secondary fermentation, we added priming sugar and bottled the beer as usual.

Delicious beer in the making

The results were really interesting and very tasty.  We were skeptical about the rhubarb because the fruit is naturally very tart.  The resulting taste perfectly mimicked a sour beer, with a nice rhubarb finish.  We were very pleased with the product!  The blueberry was a rich purple color, it looks almost like juice and could probably be mistaken for a framboise.  The blueberry flavor was present, but unlike other blueberry beers we've had, it wasn't at all sweet.  The yeast had eaten all the natural sugars.  Adding fresh blueberries helped with the sweetness and letting it age a few more weeks allowed a more complex earthy flavor to develop.

We've started the experimentation process and now we can't stop!  A banana porter and beer cookies are on the way!  Stay tuned!