AIH Fruit Wheat Recipe Kit

Beer came out poorly. Hit all the gravity markers and fermentation went very well. But the taste was not very good andseemed to lack any flavor. Very flat beer.

The wheat beer turned out great. I chose the Blackberry option which comes with 4oz of blackblerry flavoring. If I were to brew it again, I'd not use the artificial flavoring as it smelled great but tasted fake. Next time I'll try crystalized fruit extract or make a puree.

I've made many varieties of beer from multiple companies. This is by far my favorite. Nice and refreshing with lovely strawberry taste.

I added a lb of wheat dme at the end of the boil. I brewed the batch on 5/31/17, transferred to secondary on 6-10. I racked the beer into the bottling bucket with the extract and stirred gently; I was not impressed with the initial taste from the bottling bucket; the beer tasted too sweet. Good news is after 2 weeks in the bottle the flavor blended and the sweetness diminished. This is a great flavored wheat and I don't like flavored beer. 2 thumbs up!

I did a lot of research about watermelon recipes before settling on this kit. I decided to not use the watermelon extract that came with the kit and opted for real watermelon instead. The primary fermentation was very aggressive. I had to add a blowoff tube at 4AM because my air lock was all jammed up. Let the primary fermentation process go the full 2 weeks. For secondary fermentation, I bought a seedless watermelon at the store and put all the watermelon meat into a ninja blender. I did not use any of the rind at all since my research indicated that using the rind may cause an undesirable flavor. I pureed all the watermelon and threw it in the bottom of my bottling bucket. I then racked the fermented beer on top of the watermelon puree. Did everything turn very red??? YES. Did that go away??? YES! The sugars in the watermelon kicked off a secondary fermentation. I let the watermelon/beer mixture ferment for another 5 days. I probably could have gone 7, but did not want to run any risk of the fruit turning into a vinegar taste. On the 5th day, I kegged the beer and chilled it for 24 hours before force carbonating. Every time I transferred the beer (primary to secondary, secondary to keg), I ran the beer through a sanitized colander. The result was SPECTACULAR. My neighbors and I did a blind taste test with my beer and some Hell or High Watermelon, and my beer blew away the competition. I was concerned that using the real fruit would make the beer too sweet or have an overpowering watermelon taste. Totally not the case at all. The watermelon flavor is subtle. It was described as a great wheat beer taste with a nice watermelon undertone. Now that the weather here in DC has hit the 80's and low 90's, this beer is a great drink on a hot day!