cherry wheat

[grubac]

Ladies and Gents,

I'm planning on making a cherry wheat in the near future. The plan is to rack onto 10lbs of fresh, frozen cherries for secondary fermentation. Batch size 5 gallons.

This is my question:

When bottling how much priming sugar should I add to each bottle? Should I just add the usual amount or will that result in overcarbonated bottles?

grubac

[edit1now]

If it's mostly finished in the secondary then your normal amount of priming sugar should be OK. The yeasties should have eaten the sugar from the cherries and made mere alcohol with it.

[grubac]

Thanks for the reply

One more quick daft question:

Does it matter if I remove the pits? Or should I leave them whole?

grubacc

[edit1now]

I would suggest checking the cherries for dodgy bits, and discarding any which are obviously gone soft or have bruised bits. If the cherries are in good nick then leaving the pits in shouldn't matter.

[grubac]

Thanks for the replies.

I'm thinking about NOT using aroma hops and just bittering hops. I figure that this will allow the cherry taste to stand out a bit more, because it won't have to compete with the finishing hops.

What do you guys think about this?
Would annyone suggest just forgetting about the use of hops when brewing a cherry wheat?

grubac

[tomU]

You'll need hops in there - don't forget they're a preservative. Even belgian lambics use hops (although they are aged to get rid of any aroma). Just use something fairly neutral and go for 15IBUs or so

[grubac]

Nice. Thanks again for your replys

This cherry wheat is going to be brewed up tomorrow. I still have one more questions though. It's a questions about timing.

My plan is to add the cherries into the secondary fermentor - 5 gallon batch. What I'm confused about is this.

1. How long should I leave the beer in the primary?
2. How long should I leave the beer in the secondary with the cherries?
3. Should I add a little more yeast into the secondary as well??

If I let the beer ferment until it stops bubbling in the primary, when I put the beer into the secondary, without yeast, the cherries and beer will probably take forever to ferment. Or is the idea just for the beer just to attain the cherry taste during secondary fermentation?

sorry for all the questions

confused