Raspberries and what to do with them? :)

[Ian_]

Hello beery collective.

I have picked some raspberries from my back garden and am now wondering what to do with them!

I was toying with buying a lager kit and mashing them in with the primary fermentation, maybe leaving a bit longer than normal them bottling up in a raspberry tinged lager kind of way...any thoughts on that?

I just saw the polish raspberryade, thought that might be worth a pop too.
I have about 2lbs ish of them...
Anyone got any ideas?

[oldbloke]

A gallon of wine wants about 4lb soft fruit, any chance of getting more rassies?
Actually a rassy/strawb mix would be much better...

[richc]

IMO raspberries would overwhelm most basic lagers, how about a wheat beer kit.

[danbrew]

2lb of raspberries would do a gallon of wine... but I might not bother... Instead you could freeze them, get your basic kit on and nearly fermented out, then defrost the rasps and in a fine cloth wring the living daylights out of them to extract the juice... Net curtain stuff but muslin would do... Then add the juice 'to taste' in your basic lager/ wheat beer kit... allow to ferment out...

Drink the remaining juice or use it to backsweeten a basic home made wine...

[Lars]

I'm with RichC, perfect for a wheat beer. Pasteurise them on ur cooker and add them to secondary fermentor, I've done it with frozen before

[smeggedup]

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=43329&hilit=+WINE

take a look here
done this twice now and its been fantastic

[mooj]

You could make a liquor. I regularly make a boysenberry liquor which is delicious and I have done it with raspberries too. The method I use is to juice them, strain them and add sugar and vodka. For a 1/2L of juice I normally add 3/4L of vodka and top up with sugar to 1.5L. This will give just under 19% using 37.5% vodka. You need to keep the alcohol content reasonably high so it keeps well and doesn't go off. You can add a small drop of this to sparkling wine, cider or even beer if you like that kind of thing. The great thing is still having some for Christmas or any other special occasions, if you can keep it that is!

[Ian_]

Sorry about the lack of response from me! Busy bottling and capping!
I sterilised and mashed, making a messy raspberry juice, added that to the primary before it had finished, which kicked it off again (natural sugars probably being yeasted!!). sg @ 1.012 and bottled with a coopers priming sweetie(my boy nicked one when he was helping me and the look on his face was a picture!!).

Hopefully I haven't made 38 glass hand grenades!!!!