11 Fruits To Incorporate Into Your Next Home-Brewed Beer

When the weather turns warm, our drink cravings turn to beer. Not only is it typically lighter and easier drinking than serious wines or cocktails, it seems to be a perfect complement for summery cookout foods such as burgers and grilled fresh seafood. And if you're year-round beer lover who keeps up with all the latest craft beer trends, you've probably noticed a proliferation of brews flavored with fruit. This practice isn't new –- drinkers have enjoyed a squirt of lime with their Mexican lagers seemingly since forever, and many traditional beer varieties, such as Belgian kriek, have always featured fruit. But it's been fun to see so many new varieties popping up on American shelves.

If you're a homebrewer as well as a beer nerd, you may want to make your own fruit-flavored beer. The safest option would be to follow a proven recipe –- maybe one used successfully by one of your brewing buddies. If you're feeling creative, however, you can experiment by adding the fruit of your choice to a favorite beer base. This can definitely work, but there are right and wrong ways to do it, depending on the flavor profile you're shooting for. To give you some inspiration for your fruit choices –- and helpful hints to ensure a flavorful brew –- we've enlisted four experts: Benny Farber, co-founder of Benny Boy Brewing; Austin LaBrune, brewer at WeldWorks Brewing Co.; Dave Reese, master cicerone, brewmaster, and founder of Fly Llama Brewing; and Jordan Childs, co-founder of Mash Gang.

If you'd like to brew with fruit but can't decide which one to try first, go with a classic. Brewers have long known that the tart, mildly funky flavor and aroma of raspberries makes them a great partner for beer. For instance, they're a popular flavoring for Belgian lambics – the raspberry flavor seems to amplify the beer's fruity sourness. Even better, raspberry-flavored beers often turn out a pretty shade of pink, making them exceptionally attractive in a glass. 

As is the case with other fruit, you can add raspberry flavoring to your brew in multiple ways. Fresh raspberries (and fruit in general) will give you the purest flavor, but can be pricey. "It's going to have the highest percentage of water by weight, so it will require more pounds per gallon of fruit to beer to achieve the desired flavor profile compared to a concentrated form of fruit," Dave Reese explained. Purees and concentrates of popular fruit, available at homebrew shops, offer an easier and more practical option for most homebrewers. And when deciding on a beer to flavor with raspberries, don't be afraid to think outside the box. "Look to culinary classics for inspiration," Reese said. For example, he suggested, you can evoke the classic dessert combo of raspberries and chocolate by adding raspberries to a milk stout.

The delicate, floral flavor and aroma of blueberries also makes them a popular addition to beer. Craft breweries have showcased blueberries in brews including Berliner weisses, pale ales, and imperial stouts, all with varying degrees of weight and sweetness. And because blueberries are not only flavorful, but plentiful when in season, they're also a popular flavoring choice among homebrewers.

Fresh blueberries are easy to incorporate into beer, but experienced brewers advise that you take the time to prep them first. First, sanitize your fruit before adding it to prevent unwelcome microbes — such as wild yeasts — from making a home in your brew. "Wild yeast on fruit can give unpredictable, exciting and sometimes unpleasant experiences," Jordan Childs explained. Freezing your berries before adding them not only helps kill off uninvited critters, but also helps the berries release their juices more easily, thus enhancing their flavoring potential. While these naturally occurring microbes can add to the flavor profile of sour beers, Benny Farber prefers aseptic fruit purees for other preparations. "If it's a sour beer, fresh fruit is the best. If you are brewing a clean beer, then an aseptic puree is ideal. If you use fresh fruit in a clean beer, it could end up becoming a sour beer due to the microbes on the fruit," he said.

Big, bold tropical fruit drinks always make us think of carefree summer days on the beach –- and if you want that vibe in a beer, consider adding tropical fruit to your homebrew. For a true taste of your favorite resort island, try passionfruit: While less familiar to Americans than other tropical fruit such as pineapples and mangos, it has an even more pronounced flavor and aroma –- bright, fruity, and floral, with a mouth-puckering tang. Because passionfruit is naturally acidic, it goes best with sour beer varieties such as gose, Berliner weisse, and sour ales. However, its fruity, floral notes can also complement the mild sweetness and fruity hops in hazy IPAs.

If you're familiar with fresh passionfruit –- plum-sized, leathery little orbs filled with seeds surrounded by sour yellow flesh –- you might wonder how to process them for beer. More importantly, you may also wonder how you're going to buy enough of them to flavor a 5-gallon batch of beer without taking out a second mortgage. They're not regularly available in most U.S. stores, and while you can buy them online, they're jaw-droppingly pricy (one source sells a dozen for $45). This is definitely a case when a pre-made puree or concentrate makes a lot more sense.

Peaches are another fruit choice that can turn a pretty-good beer into summer in a glass. And while they can flavor a variety of beers to good effect, Austin LaBrune especially likes them in yeast-forward beer varieties. "For wheat beers and saison, fruits that accentuate the yeast notes are ideal because you don't want to overdo the fruit flavor," he said. "You want the yeast character to still shine through." Among the best fruits for this purpose, he said, are peaches.

A big question for brewers making fruited beers is when to add the fruit. According to our experts, this will depend on the type of beer you're making and the flavor profile you want to achieve. "The reality is you get the ultimate fruit flavor by adding real fruit post fermentation," LaBrune said. "However, that is the riskiest way of utilizing fruit at a home brew scale because of the risk of infection, oxidation, and secondary fermentation." Dave Reese agrees. "As a general rule of thumb, the later in the process that you add your fruit, the more fruit flavor you are going to get," he said. However, adding fruit early can work better in some situations. "There are advantages to adding fruit early though, mainly shelf stability," he said.

According to Benny Farber, stone fruit are always a tasty choice for flavoring beer. And if you're in the mood for something warm and wintery, rather than the summery vibes of peaches, your stone fruit of choice should be plums. Just remember that the flavor of fresh plums tends to be milder than that of peaches or other stone fruit, so plan your brew accordingly: Many homebrewers have found that the flavor of fresh plums doesn't really come through if they're added early in the fermentation, so if you're going to use them, they'd make the most noticeable contribution in a lightly flavored beer.

Plum puree or concentrate may be a more convenient option for most homebrewers — besides being easier to use, they have the added advantage of coming pre-sterilized, meaning that unlike fresh fruit, they run little risk of introducing unwanted microbes into the beer. This also makes them a great choice if you want a beer with a pronounced plum flavor: You can safely add puree to the beer at the end of the primary fermentation, which will preserve more of its flavor and aroma than fruit added early. However, this is also when the beer's temperature is low enough to make it vulnerable to contamination if fresh fruit is used. To make the most of plums' natural flavors, try them in a honey wheat ale with a Belgian yeast or as a refreshing flavor contrast in a dark stout.

Cherries are another classic choice for fruited beers. Belgian brewers were the first to experiment with cherry-enhanced beer, and to introduce a noticeable cherry flavor, they added dried red cherries to the beer at the start of fermentation. This not only gave the beer a wonderfully fruity character, but made the resulting beer a pretty shade of red. Today, cherry beers continue to be popular in Belgium as well as in Germany and the Czech Republic, where they're considered a good match for both savory foods such as charcuterie and sweet treats like cheesecake.

We love to eat cherries out of hand because they pack such a flavor punch, and this is what also makes them a great addition to beer, especially sours, according to Austin LaBrune. "For sours, Berliners, and gose, using fruits high in acid and with heavy aroma will make a much more powerful fruit flavor," he said, adding that cherries were among his top picks in this category.

Apricots are another summery favorite for beer. Like peaches, they're a great complement for yeast-forward beers such as saisons and wheat beers –- they bring a powerful flavor of their own without overwhelming the distinctive aroma of the yeast. For instance, Blue Moon offers an apricot wheat beer with added flavoring from cardamom. Apricots also appear in other varieties of beer, such as pale ales and sours.

The strength and nature of the apricot flavor in your beer will depend on numerous factors, such as when you introduce the fruit into the beer and the type of fruit you use. If you use fresh fruit alone, its natural sugars will ferment out, so you may get an apricot aroma, but none of its sweetness. Some brewers rely on extracts, added at the end of fermentation, to add a more powerful apricot flavor. But while this can produce satisfying results, if not used carefully, extracts can backfire. "It's also a lot more challenging to use extract because there's a fine line between 'that'll do' and 'way too much.'" Austin LaBrune said. 

A hint of lemon seems to make everything it touches taste lighter and brighter, and beer is no exception. A great example of this is the Radler, a low-proof German summer sipper consisting of equal parts lager and lemon soda. Originally devised by an overwhelmed Bavarian innkeeper desperate to stretch out his limited supply of beer, it became a favorite of drinkers seeking something lighter than a standard beer and less sweet than a soda.

You can work lemon into your homebrew in other ways as well. The easiest way is to offer lemon wedges with your beer for drinkers to squirt in at will. Bear in mind, of course, that not all beers play well with lemon –- your best bets are light, mildly flavored varieties such as Mexican lagers and wheat beers. And if you want to incorporate lemon into your brew itself, Dave Reese recommends using dried lemon peel, since the peel holds most of the fruit's aromatic oils.

A wedge of lime is a classic accompaniment to Mexican lagers, and commercial brewers and homebrewers alike have paid homage to this combo by creating their own lime-enhanced lagers. But a standard light lager isn't your only option –- the gentle, summery aroma of lime can also enhance a tangy gose, a funky lambic, or a mild wheat beer. Another fun possibility is to combine lime with another complementary flavor –- for instance, homebrewers have had success with brews flavored with raspberries and lime or lime and vanilla.

If you want the distinctive aroma of lime but not the sourness in your brew, dried limes or dried or fresh lime zest are your best option –- they contain most of the fruit's flavor and aroma, but little of its acidity. Another option is to bypass the zest and use food-grade essential oils, but because these are so potent, proceed with caution when using them: Test it out on a gallon-sized sample from your batch to determine amount that best suits your taste before adding it to the rest of your brew.

If you're a fan of Belgian witbier –- a cloudy, yeasty, wheat beer –- you're already familiar with the flavor of orange in beer, whether you realize it or not: Coriander and orange zest are traditional flavorings for this variety, and glasses of witbier are often served with a slice of orange as a garnish.

If you're planning to brew your own witbier, you've probably already sourced your orange zest. Other varieties of beer also pair well with orange –- breweries offer everything from pilsners to American wheat beers to double IPAs scented with orange. As a homebrewer, you can experiment and add orange to any brew you like –- for instance, try an orange creamsicle ale flavored with orange zest and vanilla. And don't feel intimidated by the prospect of trying an original flavor combination. "The craft brewing industry in America was built by adventurous brewers who weren't afraid to take chances." Dave Reese said. "Have fun with it. Don't be afraid to fail."

Bright orange and powerfully flavored — juicy, sweet mangos make their presence known in any preparation they appear in. They're a favorite of Jordan Childs, a self-described "mango obsessive," who incorporates them into Mash Gang's fruited pale ale. Dave Reese also likes to use the sweet, bold flavor profile of mangos to balance and complement hop flavors. "Add some mango to a New Zealand IPA and watch the bitter hops be tamed by the sweet fruit while the tropical mango brings out the beautiful flavors of Nectaron hops," he said.

As a homebrewer, you have plenty of options for getting mango (or other fruit) flavoring into your beer. For beginning brewers, Jordan Childs recommends extracts as the safest and easiest option. Because they contain no added sugar, they won't affect your brew's fermentation or require you to recalibrate your recipe. They can, however, easily overwhelm your beer, so watch your quantities closely. "Start with extracts in EXISTING beers you know well, get used to dosing them," Childs advised. "You'll learn fast and inexpensively."